Before becoming a senior fellow with Georgetown University’s Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues, Dennis Wilder served in the George Bush Jnr and Barack Obama administrations in a number of national security positions, including as the CIA’s deputy assistant director for East Asia and the Pacific from 2015 to 2016.
In the latest instalment of the Open Questions series, Wilder shares his views on President Donald Trump’s cuts to the US federal government’s bureaucracy as well as the most sensitive issues determining China-US relations.
First of all, in my 36 years of experience in the federal government, in the US government, I have never seen anybody use a commercial communication system to discuss such sensitive topics.
We spend a lot of money in the US government building secured communications. We have an organisation called the White House Communications Agency, we call it WHCA, and they put in secure communications for all of us.
For example, when I held a very high position in government, they made a room in my house where I could discuss these things that was secure and they gave me a communication system.
