A longtime adviser to the US Director of National Intelligence has resigned after the government learned he has worked since 2010 as a paid consultant for Huawei, the Chinese technology company the US has condemned as an espionage threat.
The Associated Press has learned 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 US 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 Congressman Frank Wolf complained in September to the intelligence director, James Clapper, that Moran's work on an international advisory council for Huawei "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 US," Wolf wrote.
Moran, who earlier had declined to discuss the matter, said in a statement Friday to the AP, "I was totally transparent."
He said he told the National Intelligence Council in 2010 about his membership on Huawei's advisory panel.
"I complied with all conflict of interest reports and procedures of the National Intelligence Council," Moran said. A spokesman for Clapper's office confirmed on Friday that Moran was no longer associated with the intelligence council "effective September 2013" but declined to answer further questions, citing the US Privacy Act.
His resignation also was confirmed by Wolf and two federal officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorised to discuss the case publicly.
"If he wants to make a lot of money advising Huawei, that's his prerogative," Wolf told the AP.
"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 US government and Huawei, China's leading developer of telephone and internet infrastructure, which has been condemned in the US 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 US market.
In a policy paper distributed by Huawei, Moran wrote in May that, "targeting one or two companies on the basis of their national origins does nothing for US security in a world of global supply chains."
Moran criticised what he described as "a policy of discrimination and distortion that discourages valuable inward investment from overseas, while providing a precedent for highly damaging copycat practices in other countries."
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.
