A longtime adviser to the U.S. Director of National Intelligence has resigned after the government learned he has worked since 2010 as a paid consultant for a Chinese technology company the U.S. has condemned as an espionage threat.
Theodore H. Moran, a respected expert on China’s international investment and professor at Georgetown University, had served since 2007 as adviser to the intelligence director’s advisory panel on foreign investment in the United States. Moran also was an adviser to the National Intelligence Council, a group of 18 senior analysts and policy experts who provide U.S. spy agencies with judgments on important international issues.
Moran, who had a security clearance granting him access to sensitive materials, was forced to withdraw from those roles after Republican Rep. Frank Wolf complained in September to the intelligence director, James Clapper, that Moran’s work on an international advisory council for Huawei Technologies Ltd. “compromises his ability to advise your office.”
“It is inconceivable how someone serving on Huawei’s board would also be allowed to advise the intelligence community on foreign investments in the U.S.,” Wolf wrote.
A spokesman for Clapper’s office confirmed Friday that Moran was no longer associated with the intelligence council but declined to answer further questions, citing the U.S. Privacy Act. Moran also declined to discuss the matter. Moran’s resignation also was confirmed by Wolf and two federal officials who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“If he wants to make a lot of money advising Huawei, that’s his prerogative,” Wolf said. “But he shouldn’t be on a critical advisory board that provides intelligence advice on foreign investments in our country.”
The case highlights the ongoing fractious relationship between the U.S. government and Huawei, China’s leading developer of telephone and Internet infrastructure, which has been condemned in the U.S. as a potential national security threat. Huawei has aggressively disputed this, and its chief executive, Ren Zhengfei, has said the company has decided to abandon the U.S. market.
The House Intelligence Committee last year said Huawei and another firm, ZTE, posed a threat that could enable Chinese intelligence services to tamper with American communications networks. The committee said it could not prove wrongdoing but recommended that the companies be barred from doing business in the country.
Huawei’s vice president for external affairs, William Plummer, declined to discuss Moran’s resignation, but he said U.S suspicions about Huawei have created “a political smokescreen.” He said the controversy amounted to a “political game that’s holding Huawei hostage to somehow gain leverage with the Chinese government. Huawei is no threat to U.S. networks and data.”
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