THE Beijing government “systematically dismantled” CIA spying operations in China, starting in late 2010, and killed or imprisoned at least a dozen CIA sources over the next two years, The New York Times has reported.
The newspaper cited 10 current and former US officials, who described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades.
The report said US intelligence and law enforcement agencies had scrambled to stem the damage caused by the breach, but were bitterly divided over its cause. The CIA has declined to comment.
Some investigators were convinced there was a mole within the CIA, while others believed the Chinese had hacked into the covert system the CIA used to communicate with its foreign sources.
China also put others in jail, meaning they either killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the CIA’s sources in China over a two-year period, it was claimed, citing two former senior American officials.
This meant the Chinese counter-espionage actions effectively unravelled a network that had taken years to build.
The number of CIA assets lost in China rivalled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia as a result of the betrayals by both CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who were arrested in 1994 and 2001, respectively, the report said.
Investigators suspected a former CIA operative of being a mole, but failed to gather enough evidence to arrest him and he is now living in another Asian country, the report said.
Those who rejected the mole theory attributed the losses to sloppy American tradecraft in China. By 2013, the FBI and CIA concluded that China no longer had the ability to identify American agents.
The Times said the breach demonstrates the difficulty of conducting counter-espionage investigations in countries with sophisticated spy services like those in Russia and China, at a time when the CIA is figuring out how some of its documents were leaked on to the internet by WikiLeaks and as the FBI investigates ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia.
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