317. 'The Great Heist': A New Book by Ex-Intel Officer David Shedd
The Sharyl Attkisson Podcast
Sharyl Attkisson
4.9 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 11 December 2025
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets. Author David Shedd, an ex-intel officer, shares the shocking information he's learned.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, everybody. It's Cheryl Ackison. Welcome to another edition of the Cheryl |
| 0:07.4 | Ackison podcast. Today, The Great Heist, a new book by ex-Intel Officer David Shed. |
| 0:17.1 | The phrase, the great heist, could refer to a lot of different things today, but for our purposes in this podcast, it's referring to what author and former intelligence officer David Shed calls China's epic campaign to steal America's secrets. |
| 0:32.7 | He's great at explaining what he's uncovered, the perils, and why it matters to all of us. |
| 0:38.4 | Here's David Shed. |
| 0:40.6 | So for about 33 years, starting in 1982, when I joined CIA, I came up through the ranks of the |
| 0:48.7 | case officer track, which is the human intelligence collection side of CIA's operational directorate. |
| 0:58.3 | And I worked mostly in Latin America, then a couple of years on China as, again, a human |
| 1:05.9 | intelligence collector well into the mid-1990s. Then I went on to serve in the George W. Bush White House from |
| 1:15.6 | 2001 to 2005 with the creation of the Director of National Intelligence. I went as Ambassador |
| 1:23.5 | John Negroponte's chief of staff when he became DNI served there four years, went on to become the |
| 1:32.9 | deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency for four years and then for the last six months |
| 1:38.5 | beyond that, I served as the acting director at DIA before retiring from government service. |
| 1:47.3 | The impetus for the book, which is interesting, was that so many of us, about 22 plus |
| 1:53.5 | million former and current people with clearances, top secret and secret clearances, had their data all stolen, |
| 2:04.5 | their security files stolen in May of 2015. |
| 2:08.3 | And this, for me, was quite transformational in terms of the size and scope that another |
| 2:16.0 | country would, one, get access to the Office of Personnel and Management |
| 2:20.6 | files, of our security files, passed and currently serving personnel. And then on top of that, |
| 2:30.0 | the fact that it was China and that China was on to something that we, I think, had either |
| 2:36.8 | minimized or had outright missed in terms of this, what we'd call this epic theft that has |
| 2:45.6 | gone on for now several decades, but escalated since 2015 when China, under Xi Jinping, launched |
... |
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