One day I sat next to some of Mandia’s team, watching the Unit 61398 hacking corps at work; it was a remarkable sight. My previous mental image of PLA officers was a bunch of stiff old generals sitting around in uniforms with epaulets, reminiscing about the glory days with Mao. But these guys were wearing leather jackets or just undershirts, and probably saw Mao only if they visited his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. “They were such bros,” Andrew Schwartz, one of Mandia’s communications specialists, recalled later. “But they were prodigious thieves.” They were also thieves with multiple
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