The Great Heist: China's Epic Campaign to Steal America's Secrets

A definitive, headline-making exposé of how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has carried out the largest-scale theft of intellectual property, technology, and data in history--reshaping the global balance of power and redrawing the geopolitical map for decades to come

The Great Heist exposes China's unprecedented state-orchestrated espionage campaign to strip the United States and its allies of their economic, technological, and military edge. Through a coordinated "whole-of-society" strategy, the Chinese Communist Party has dramatically expanded its covert operations to acquire America's most valuable innovations--stealing defense secrets and proprietary technology from companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Google, T-Mobile, and Tesla. By exploiting both human and cyber vulnerabilities, China has quietly looted the crown jewels of Western technology, saving itself trillions in R&D costs since the 1990s--with an ongoing brazenness fueled by decades of Western inaction.

Drawing on exclusive investigations and interviews with intelligence officers, corporate security teams, senior policymakers, and espionage victims, David R. Shedd and Andrew Badger reveal how industrial theft has fueled China's meteoric rise from Third World backwater to global superpower--and present a bold strategic playbook to turn the tide in the greatest economic contest of our time.

David R. Shedd is the former deputy director and acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He also served as chief of staff for the director of national intelligence and National Security Council senior director and as special assistant to the president for intelligence under George W. Bush. He began his intelligence career in 1982 immediately after his studies at Geneva College and Georgetown University, and served nearly thirty-three years in a wide variety of positions both inside and outside of the CIA during his career.

Andrew Badger is a former DIA case officer and graduate of the CIA's elite training program, The Farm. He served on the front lines of human intelligence operations, including a 2014 deployment to Afghanistan in support of US military operations. In the private sector, Badger has advised global firms such as McKinsey & Company and Deutsche Bank on geopolitical risk. He holds a bachelor's degree in government from Harvard and a master's in diplomatic studies from the University of Oxford, where he is a research associate and lectures on state sponsored espionage.