WASHINGTON • The Chinese government systematically dismantled the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (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 afterwards.
Current and former US 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 bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced there was a mole within the CIA. 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 US 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, said two former senior US officials, effectively unravelling a network that had taken years to build.
Assessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of US assets lost in China, officials said, rivalled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the CIA and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) respectively, who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years.
The previously unreported episode shows how successful the Chinese were in disrupting US spying efforts and stealing secrets years before a well-publicised breach in 2015 gave Beijing 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 exceptionally hard for Western spy services to develop sources there.
At a time when the CIA is trying to figure out how some of its most sensitive documents were leaked onto the Internet two months ago by WikiLeaks and the FBI investigates possible ties between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russia, the unsettled nature of the China investigation demonstrates the difficulty of conducting counter-espionage investigations into sophisticated spy services like those in Russia and China.
The CIA and the FBI both declined to comment.
Details about the investigation have been tightly held. Ten current and former US 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. The quality of the CIA's information about the inner workings of the Chinese government then was the best it had been for years, the result of recruiting sources deep inside the bureaucracy in Beijing. Some were Chinese citizens who the CIA believed had become disillusioned with the Chinese government's corruption.
But by the end of the year, the flow of information began to dry up. By early 2011, senior agency officers realised they had a problem: Assets in China, one of their most precious resources, were disappearing.
NYTIMES
