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The New York Times reports that the Central Intelligence Agency faced one of its worst intelligence gathering setbacks in decades when many of its informants in China were killed or imprisoned between 2010 and 2012. To this day, it is unknown how the identities of the informants were compromised:
From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.'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 C.I.A.
Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.'s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling 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 American 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 C.I.A. and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years.
The previously unreported episode shows how successful the Chinese were in disrupting American spying efforts and stealing secrets years before a well-publicized breach in 2015 gave Beijing access to thousands of government personnel records, including intelligence contractors. The C.I.A. 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.
Also at BBC, which notes:
Last year, China warned government officials to watch out for spies - and not fall in love with them
This CIA story really helps put that "Don't date a foreigner!" campaign in perspective. You don't want to see your significant other bleeding out in the street, do you? DO YOU?!
Update: Chinese paper applauds anti-spy efforts after report CIA sources killed
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:07AM (13 children)
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Just as with the reports of record number of kilos of coke being seized in various places around the world, the conservative way to interpret this bodes ill 4 China. If the reports are true in spirit... That is, if CIA lost more agents than ever before in the last few years, the simplest explanation is, the agency HAS more agents than ever before! That would make perfect sense, since Chinese these days have an amazing level of access to ideas such as democracy, and a record number of Chinese are scratching their heads right now trying to figure out whether the state should serve the people or the people should serve the state. This was not really a question many Chinese have entertained for the last 10000 years, unless you also count the death row philosophers.
China hopes against all hope to go on with the political philosophy outlined by Confuzius and Li Erh: punish thought crime with death, and all shall be well. This works great until the state starts providing anything resembling the Internet. People in China found out about "democracy", for example, the moment the state started censoring Web pages containing the word. The Chinese brand of Censorship does not work on the Internet because people can plainly see WHAT is being censored, defeating the purpose.
So the simplest, Occamiest explanation of the trend is that more Chinese than ever before are being so dissatisfied with their government, they are willing 2 aid a foreign intel service, even though the fallout is as grim as always.
Reader, watch China carefully. They are the world's powder keg. No one will be ready for that explosion, because no one believes it will happen. But if and when a revolutionary spark appears there, it will be entirely too late to make any plans.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday May 22 2017, @06:29AM (2 children)
China may be a powder keg, but the powder might be too damp to ignite. There has to be some build up and Tienanmen Square or Arab Spring style events. Things need to get... dry.
No:
Another simple explanation is that the unnamed sources are not lying, U.S. government cybersecurity is total crap and led to a significant loss of agents/assets in China, and that recovery will be difficult given events like the Office of Personnel Management hack.
Even when it doesn't work, it has the intended effect:
https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/how-china-made-the-tiananmen-square-massacre-irrelevant/276500/ [theatlantic.com]
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/03/chinas-youth-think-tiananmen-was-so-1989-protester-crackdown-historical-memory/ [foreignpolicy.com]
https://newrepublic.com/article/117983/tiananmen-square-massacre-how-chinas-millennials-discuss-it-now [newrepublic.com]
The people most likely to be useful to the CIA are in the Communist Party. They are people with connections and likely money, so they are not dissatisfied with the status quo. For ordinary Chinese, they've seen one of the greatest reductions in poverty in the history of the planet, and even the relatively poor have a much higher status of living and access to good ol' electronic entertainment (the "circuses" part of bread and circuses).
You can give Occam his razor back.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:41AM (1 child)
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I disagree with an assertion that the Chinese brand of censorship "has the intended effect", if the intended effect is: less free speech than before. The effect is, at best, the slowing-down of the public discourse that can only happen in a free society. Free to discuss, free to think, but obviously not to act at the moment. As we speak, words such as "democracy" are known to every Chinese person, and not only they know what these "forbidden" words mean, they also know WHY these words are forbidden. This is an UNACCEPTABLE level of understanding of the political process, according to 5000-plus year old dogmas, but it's happening now, and there's absolutely no way to stop it.
For someone who grew up in US, it is hard to comprehend how a society can function when people who criticize the government are summarily executed, but that's how Chinese got to where they are now. And the rules are about to change. They have already in the heads of the people, but not in the heads of their rulers, and not in the letter of the law. But think about something like Tienanmen Square happening today: would the Emperor be able to stop the sharing of cell-phone photos of tanks running over peaceful, unarmed protesters? And what would the public opinon be? And what would it do in the regions which don't speak Mandarin? Or even the regions which do speak Mandarin?
Chinese may just do OK, but more probably and more tragically, the Empire will start coming apart, and it will be a series of very jerky moves, and no one will see them coming.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @03:03PM
You certainly swallowed the anti-China propaganda hook line and sinker.
You will recall the most memorable part of the "massacre of unarmed civilians" was the fact that the tank didn't run him over...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:32AM (1 child)
What else besides "democracy" do the regime tries to censor?
Makes one wonder how close a possible powder keg event is. And what relationships will then be after such event. They have nukes, large army, international industries have their production facilities there etc. So it will impact the whole globe.
By working for this foreign organization they also buy their ticket out of constant fear. Not now, but in the future.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @07:05AM
> What else besides "democracy" do the regime tries to censor?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @06:38AM (2 children)
The New York Times article says "by the end of the year [2010], the flow of information began to dry up." It also uses the expression "unraveling a network that had taken years to build." Those are odd things to say, if the situation is as you suppose.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @07:06AM (1 child)
Hash: SHA256
NYTimes says a lot of odd things. Or, to phrase it in a more sensible way, they are full of shit. Here's a taste: https://chomsky.info/20150406/
"unraveling a network that had taken years to build"... Evidence? No, I didn't think so. I personally do not even trust their report of CIA agent exposure incidence, but like I said, I find that plausible, given the actual, factual conditions I described. I understand how and why the recruiting is up, and if the recruiting is up, then of course the counter-intel impact is up, and it's a simple proportion. Are you intercepting 10 times more heroin at the border? Congratulations! Now you know the shipment rate is up 1000%. This is the simplest inference available to us: people with no inside knowledge of CIA or its Chinese counterparts.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @07:54AM
> [...] they are full of shit.
They may be; we needn't believe that the events described in the article happened. I suppose someone who wished to check could request records regarding the Honey Badger investigation.
> [...] the actual, factual conditions I described.
Conditions that would lead an increasing number of Chinese to collaborate with the CIA, right? I reread your earlier post and "an amazing level of access to ideas such as democracy" was the closest I saw to that. Why that would apply especially between 2010 and 2012 is unclear.
(Score: 2) by Soylentbob on Monday May 22 2017, @08:30AM
I had some problems verifying the signature due to some weird behaviour of Epiphany web-browser. When copying the post to clipboard, half of the new-lines are removed [pastebin.com] leading to error messages about "invalid clearsig header" and "invalid armor header". Trying the same with Firefox works fine.
(Can we agree a post is on-topic if it refers in any meaningful way to parent post? I know I'm off-topic in relation to TFA.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @08:45AM
P.S. I like big bones.
~Anonymous 0x9932FE2729B1D963
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday May 22 2017, @09:25AM
Particularly the author of that piece. You can sense his complete bewilderment that China would do such an inconceivable thing. Who knew?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Monday May 22 2017, @12:49PM (1 child)
Chinese society is very fragile. It has "feet of clay," to borrow a Chinese phrase. It is more complex than 'oppressed people want to be free,' though. It's also not a matter of the Chinese people getting better access to better information. This is not the Cold War, when it was thought Voice of America could get the truth to oppressed people living behind the Iron Curtain. Even without the Great Firewall, there's not much of a beacon of justice or democracy out here to entice them to change.
What they do see, and what does drive the fragility, is the corruption and wealth inequality they can see around them. Party officials and well-connected individuals get wildly rich and strut around in shiny foreign cars and live in opulent palaces. Everyone else grinds to get by. Factories close and people get laid off by the tens of thousands. Protests happen, but they get shut down by troops quickly.
Sound familiar [nytimes.com]?
There are regional tensions, too. City vs. countryside, North vs. South, Coasts vs. Interior.
Sound familiar [npr.org]?
In keeping a lid on all that, China has an advantage over others in that it's happy to have the army shoot everyone, and everyone rather expects that sort of move and aren't particularly shocked by it. One disadvantage they have is they have no civil society to buffer economic dislocations or the effects of corruption, such that when things break loose they break loose all of a sudden without warning.
On the other hand, lots of warning does not seem to produce policy changes in places that have civil society, so maybe in the end China will outlast everyone else.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @02:43PM
I think you're missing one of the most important variables: nationalism. Chinese are, by and large, extremely nationalistic. That doesn't preclude change that 'goes against the [established] grain', to put it one way, but it does help ensure that that change is geared directly towards the greater good as rapidly as possible. Something trendy in just about every election is for popular voices in America to claim they'll leave the country if their preferred politician doesn't get elected. Now they never do, but the fact that their ties to country are advertised as so incredibly whimsical as to be upset by a single election is something that I think speaks to heart of the American electorate. And that heart fundamentally says, "It's my way or you're wrong."
Independence is a strength, but also a weakness. Should America begin to enter into chaos that cannot be completely mitigated and mediated by the powers that be, now that is going to a catalyst for self implosion. Chinese society may be fragile. I don't know. But I do know that ours is extremely volatile. Nationalism helps tie a country together, even in light of overt differences between themselves. In America nationalism has now begun to be used almost as a sort of pejorative.