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Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and life.

My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of the spectator.

I am delighted to be joined by Ian Williams, who is a spectator and a former foreign correspondent

for Channel 4 News and NBC. He's also author of Every Breath You Take, China's New Tyranny.

And also, I'm very delighted to be joined by Nicholas Ftimniadis. Have I pronounced that correctly, Nicholas? Yes, perfect. Good, good. And you are a senior

fellow at the Atlantic Council and a professor of Homeland Security. And we're going to be talking about

probably one of the biggest topics there is, I think,

in the world today, and that is Chinese espionage.

And it's something, I'll start with you, Ian.

It's something that has been talked about a lot in the last 20, 30 years even, as a problem.

And it's sort of increasingly bubbling up in the West's consciousness,

I'd say. And this latest story about the Chinese building pagodas near important American

national security sites has just reminded us again quite how extensive and quite how brazen

Chinese espionage is getting.

Are we reaching a point now where everybody's accepting it's a problem, or have we been saying

this for the last 20 years and it's been ignored? I think a lot of people have been saying it,

but it has been ignored. There's a sense that people have known that one of the key methods that China has

identified in order to develop, in order to develop its own technology, is through acquiring

technology, acquiring Western know-how by whatever means possible. And I think there was a sense

...