For more than two weeks now, a stream of current and former U.S. officials, this week including Amb. Bill Taylor, have described to Congressional committees the White House’s sordid effort to outsource American foreign policy to the president’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who sought to advance the personal political interests of Donald Trump. Faced with compelling testimonies to the effect that the president subverted U.S. national interests to his own, the White House has begun to trash those officials.

Even for this White House, that is a despicable new low.

The testimonies make clear that President Trump insisted on a quid pro quo, as his Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney confirmed in an October 17 press conference (he later tried to walk it back, but watch the video of the press conference). The president wanted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate a long-debunked charge about former Vice President Joe Biden, his possible opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. President Trump also wanted the Ukrainians to check whether the Democratic National Committee’s e-mail servers might have ended up in, of all places, Ukraine (no one has offered evidence to suggest that they have).

Smoking guns are the stuff of spy movies. In real-life intelligence-gathering, they are exceptionally rare. That’s why the business of intelligence typically requires collecting and analyzing fragments of information—putting together secret nuggets with unclassified information—to try to make sense of complex reality. If nothing else, the whistle-blower who filed a complaint against President Donald Trump clearly followed his or her training. SECOND PARAGRAPH I’ve spent 20 years reading intelligence reports and researching the U.S. intelligence community. And I’m not automatically inclined to believe the worst allegations about any administration; everyone has agendas and incentives to reveal information, some more noble than others. Trump and his allies have dismissed the complaint as hearsay and accused the whistle-blower of acting on political motives. But a close reading of the whistle-blower’s lengthy complaint, which accuses Trump of “using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election,” yields a lot of concrete leads for investigators to follow.

Here are three things I learned:

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Thirty years ago this week, I watched the news from Beijing and started shredding my bedding. It was the night before my college graduation, I had been studying Chinese politics, and news had broken that college students just like us had been gunned down in Tiananmen Square after weeks of peaceful and exhilarating democracy protests—carried on international TV. In the iconic square where Mao Zedong had proclaimed the People’s Republic decades before, bespectacled students from China’s best universities had camped out, putting up posters with slogans of freedom in Chinese and English. A “goddess of democracy” figure modeled after the Statue of Liberty embodied their hopes—and ours—for political liberation in China.

On my campus back then were just a handful of students majoring in East Asian studies. Learning of the brutal crackdown in Beijing, we somehow found one another, gathered our friends, and stayed up making hundreds of white armbands for classmates to wear at commencement the next day. Grappling with the cold realities of the “real world” we were about to enter, we didn’t know what else to do. So we tore sheets and cried for what might have been.

The June 4, 1989, massacre was a horrifying spectacle that the Chinese government has sought to erase from national memory ever since. But, 30 years later, contemplating what might have been is more important than ever. In hindsight, Tiananmen Square serves as a continuing reminder about just how much China has defied, and continues to defy, the odds and predictions of experts. The fact is that generations of American policy makers, political scientists, and economists have gotten China wrong more often than they’ve gotten China right. In domestic politics, economic development, and foreign policy, China has charted a surprising path that flies in the face of professional prognostications, general theories about anything, and the experience of other nations.

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Congress’s annual worldwide-threat hearings are usually scary affairs, during which intelligence-agency leaders run down all the dangers confronting the United States. This year’s January assessment was especially worrisome, because the minds of American citizens were listed as key battlegrounds for geopolitical conflict for the first time. “China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea increasingly use cyber operations to threaten both minds and machines in an expanding number of ways,” wrote Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats. Coats went on to suggest that Russia’s 2016 election interference is only the beginning, with new tactics and deep fakes probably coming soon, and the bad guys learning from experience.

Deception, of course, has a long history in statecraft and warfare. The Greeks used it to win at the Battle of Salamis in the fifth century b.c. The Allies won the Second World War in Europe with a surprise landing at Normandy—which hinged on an elaborate plan to convince Hitler that the invasion would be elsewhere. Throughout the Cold War, the Soviets engaged in extensive “active measure” operations, using front organizations, propaganda, and forged American documents to peddle half-truths, distortions, and outright lies in the hope of swaying opinion abroad.

But what makes people susceptible to deception? A colleague and I recently launched the two-year Information Warfare Working Group at Stanford. Our first assignment was to read up on psychology research, which drove home how vulnerable we all are to wishful thinking and manipulation.

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Closing the gap between technology leaders and policy makers will require a radically different approach from the defense establishment.

A silent divide is weakening America’s national security, and it has nothing to do with President Donald Trump or party polarization. It’s the growing gulf between the tech community in Silicon Valley and the policy-making community in Washington.

Beyond all the acrimonious headlines, Democrats and Republicans share a growing alarm over the return of great-power conflict. China and Russia are challenging American interests, alliances, and values—through territorial aggression; strong-arm tactics and unfair practices in global trade; cyber theft and information warfare; and massive military buildups in new weapons systems such as Russia’s “Satan 2” nuclear long-range missile, China’s autonomous weapons, and satellite-killing capabilities to destroy our communications and imagery systems in space. Since Trump took office, huge bipartisan majorities in Congress have passed tough sanctions against Russia, sweeping reforms to scrutinize and block Chinese investments in sensitive American technology industries, and record defense-budget increases. You know something’s big when senators like the liberal Ron Wyden and the

In Washington, alarm bells are ringing. Here in Silicon Valley, not so much. “Ask people to finish the sentence, ‘China is a ____ of the United States,’” said the former National Economic Council chairman Keith Hennessey. “Policy makers from both parties are likely to answer with ‘competitor,’ ‘strategic rival,’ or even ‘adversary,’ while Silicon Valley leaders will probably tell you China is a ‘supplier,’ ‘investor,’ and especially ‘potential market.’”

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The Founding Fathers relied on deceit in championing American independence—and that has lessons for the present.

As we celebrate Thanksgiving weekend, a holiday first declared by George Washington’s presidential proclamation in 1789, it is worth remembering that deception played a pivotal role in America’s birth. Our shining city on the hill owes much to the dark arts. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and other Founding Fathers are remembered today as virtuous creators of a bold new democracy. But they were also cunning manipulators of their information environment—a side of the founding story that has often been neglected by history.

George Washington’s inability to tell a lie is a lie. That old cherry-tree fable—in which young George admits to his father that he did, indeed, chop down the tree with his hatchet—was invented by a Washington biographer named Mason Locke Weems in 1806 to boost his book sales. In truth, Washington was an avid spymaster with a talent for deception that would remain unequaled by American presidents for the next 150 years. During the Revolutionary War, Washington was referred to by his own secret code number (711), made ready use of ciphers and invisible ink, developed an extensive network of spies that reported on British troop movements and identified American traitors, and used all sorts of schemes to protect his forces, confuse his adversaries, and gain advantage. His military strategy was to outsmart and outlast the enemy, not outfight him. He used intelligence to avoid more battles than he fought, and to trick the British into standing down when standing up could have meant the end of the Continental Army.

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On May 23, Stanford students enrolled in Technology and Security (MS&E 193/293) met with General James M. Holmes. General Holmes delivered delivered gave a talk, "Applying Technology--the Military Perspective," and engaged students in a Q&A session afterwards. The interisciplinary course explores the relation between technology, war, and national security policy from early history to modern day, focusing on current U.S. national security challenges and the role that technology plays in shaping our understanding and response to these challenges.

General James M. Holmes

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