This is John Batchel, a conversation with colleague Grant Nusium, the author of When Channis Attacks.

We're looking at an oddity on YouTube and X and other platforms, a video, movie, short movie, made for the CIA by someone Hollywood-like about recruiting or imagining a Chinese

national who spies on his own country from inside the Communist Party, an executive who spies

on his own country from inside the party, a junior executive, junior communist aid, bizarre.

Grant and I fuss about what it means. Grant and I admit we don't know. I mean, there are

very famous cases. None of them were recruited from a movie put on YouTube or a brief movie,

an imagined movie. In any event, Grant takes a look at the CIA. And if this is the product,

what is the organization doing? How is it helping? Grand Newsom, a genuine thing.

Look at it on CIA website, on YouTube, just CIA recruiting Chinese spy, question mark.

More of this tonight.

Well, yeah, it's hard to imagine.

One does wonder if the new CIA director, John Ratcliffe, really has any interest in cleaning up the place.

Maybe not.

You know, maybe he just wants to have the job for a while and move on to the next thing.

But the place, some would say, really needs a flamethrower applied to it.

If this is what passes for a serious effort to recruit a hard target, there's no shortcuts.

It requires a lot of patience and training and people who know what they're doing and some good platforms to go after people, but the spy business is as old as mankind. It's not something that I think the internet revolution

has changed very much. Now, this is an odd way to go about it.