Officials detail CIA setbacks in China
Beijing used killings, jailings to dismantle U.S. spy network over two-year period
WASHINGTON — The Chinese government systematically dismantled CIA spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.
Current and former U.S. officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the CIA had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the CIA used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.
But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former U.S. officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the CIA’s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the CIA.
Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the CIA’s sources in China, according to two former senior U.S. officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.
The episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of U.S. assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the CIA and the FBI, who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years.
The previously unreported episode shows how successful the Chinese were in disrupting U.S. spying efforts and stealing secrets years before a well-publicized breach in 2015 gave China access to thousands of government personnel records, including intelligence contractors. The CIA considers spying in China one of its top priorities, but the country’s extensive security apparatus makes it hard for Western spy services to develop sources there.
The CIA and the FBI both declined to comment.
Details about the investigation have been tightly held. Ten current and former U.S. officials described the investigation on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to be identified discussing the information.
The first signs of trouble emerged in 2010, when the flow of information from China began to dry up. By early 2011, senior agency officers realized that assets in China were disappearing.
The FBI and the CIA opened a joint investigation run by top counterintelligence officials at both agencies. Nearly every employee at the U.S. Embassy was scrutinized, no matter how high ranking. Some investigators believed the Chinese had cracked the encrypted method that the CIA used to communicate with its assets. Others suspected a traitor in the CIA.
The mole hunt eventually zeroed in on a former agency operative who had worked in the CIA’s division overseeing China. But efforts to gather enough evidence to arrest him failed, and he is now living in another Asian country, current and former officials said.
Those who rejected the mole theory attributed the losses to sloppy U.S. tradecraft at a time when the Chinese were becoming better at monitoring U.S. espionage activities in the country. Some FBI agents became convinced that CIA handlers in Beijing too often traveled the same routes to the same meeting points, which would have helped China’s vast surveillance network identify the spies in its midst.
Some officers met their sources at a restaurant where Chinese agents had planted listening devices, former officials said, and even the waiters worked for Chinese intelligence.
This carelessness, coupled with the possibility that the Chinese had hacked the covert communications channel, would explain many, if not all, of the disappearances and deaths, some former officials said.