The National Security Roundtable

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Bill Gertz is the acclaimed defense and national security reporter for The Washington Times, a position he's held since 1985. Among his many major exclusives, Gertz was the first to report on a Chinese submarine secretly sailing undetected within 5 miles of the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk in October 2006; the Pentagon activating its missile defense system in June 2006 in preparation for the possible shootdown of a North Korean missile launch; China's deployment of a new class of attack submarines; details of Russia's covert involvement in removing weapons from Saddam Hussein's Iraq; and details of North Korean government involvement in counterfeiting U.S. currency. He was the first to disclose how China was building up short-range missiles opposite Taiwan, and on China’s exporting of ballistic missile technology to Pakistan, a disclosure that led to the imposition of U.S. economic sanctions against China and Pakistan.

China's communist government has criticized Gertz for his news reports exposing China's weapons and missile sales to rogues states, and accused him of "spreading lies about China." The state-run Xinhua news agency called him “the No. 1 anti-China expert" in the world, while Vyachaslav Trubnikov, head of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service called him a "tool of the CIA" after Gertz wrote an article exposing Russian intelligence operations in the Balkans. Former Defense Secretary William Cohen once remarked to a Chinese General “Bill has access to more intelligence information than anyone I know!"

Gertz is the author of six books, four of which were national bestsellers. His most recent, The Failure Factory (Sept 2008), takes a critical look at the problem of an out-of-control government bureaucracy. He was a media Fellow at the Hoover Institution/Stanford University, and has lectured at the FBI National Academy, the CIA, the National Defense University, and the Brookings Institution. He writes a weekly column for the Washington Times called Inside the Ring, chronicling the ups and downs of the U.S. national security bureaucracy; is an analyst for FOX News; and writes for major publications. A senior CIA official once threatened to have a cruise missile fired at Gertz's desk at The Washington Times, after he wrote a column critical of the CIA's analysis of China, but former CIA Director R. James Woolsey has said: “When I was DCI, Bill used to drive me crazy because I couldn't figure out where the leaks were coming from. Now that I've been outside for two years, I read him religiously to find out what's going on.”