The FBI Spent a Generation Relearning How to Catch Spies. Then Came Kash Patel.

AMERICA HAD BEEN AT WAR FOR TWO WEEKS but didn’t know it. The onslaught began with a fleet of store-bought drones swarming a power substation in Pennsylvania, delivering explosives made from common chemicals. They shredded switchgear and control systems, cutting power to airports, hospitals, and nearly half a million homes.

Hours later, a far-right extremist group calling itself “Dark Reich” took credit for the attack in an anonymous video replete with Nazi and occult symbols. The group hailed the blackout as the opening salvo of a campaign to bring down the U.S. government. They urged others to replicate their efforts and ignite a race war.

Over the next few days, copycat attacks cut the power for hundreds of thousands of Americans as summer temperatures soared into the 90s. Nobody could figure out who was piloting the drones. Each incident looked amateurish, yet the pattern worried FBI officials. Bureau investigators began to suspect a foreign adversary might be quietly orchestrating “gray-zone” attacks—covert strikes that offered plausible deniability.

Soon anonymous cyberattacks compounded the damage, crippling municipal governments, water systems, and first-responder networks from Atlanta to Denver. Rail corridors and ports—critical for stocking grocery stores and mobilizing the military—snarled in the digital gridlock. In an already toxic political climate, the White House was unable to craft a coherent response. Two weeks into the crisis, the source of the chaos became clear when China launched a swift and decisive invasion of Taiwan, and the United States was too paralyzed by domestic strife to stop it.

This scenario—hypothetical, but based on very real fears—is laid out in a 2024 RAND Corporation study modeling how America’s enemies could mask state-directed attacks as the work of extremists or criminal groups. Carrying out an operation of this magnitude on American soil would require a sophisticated network of spies. Which is exactly what China’s security services have been building since the late 1970s, stealing vital military, nuclear, and technological secrets en masse.

Recently, Beijing’s intelligence services have gotten more aggressive. They’ve activated clandestine networks to organize violent crackdowns inside the United States, kidnapped American citizens, and carried out sweeping cyberattacks that hit everything from telecom giants to military IT networks. Some security researchers have speculated that, in a crisis, China’s espionage networks could quickly be repurposed for sabotage.

American security experts fear that growing networks of foreign spies,