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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) by Grishnakh on Monday May 22 2017, @03:08PM (3 children)
The sad thing is, these people aren't exactly "the spies" (and not American), at least according to my reading of TFS. They're the spies' informants: they're people the spies conned into working with them, perhaps even by exploiting romantic feelings. It takes a particularly horrible kind of person to seduce someone, take advantage of their loneliness, and then use that to convince them to do your dirty work for you. Then, who takes the fall? The victim, not the actual spy working for the foreign country.
(Score: 2) by pkrasimirov on Monday May 22 2017, @03:44PM (1 child)
Maybe there should be some proof before shooting the people, such as hard cash as evidence. Love alone is hard to track on paper. But then again this is China so maybe I'm wrong and they don't bother with such details.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday May 22 2017, @04:45PM
Maybe they shouldn't shoot anyone at all. But this isn't a discussion over how China should treat spies or their informants; China's going to do what they're going to do. I'm just pointing out that the OP's lack of sympathy is probably misplaced, because the *real* spies don't seem to be getting the punishment here, only the "useful idiots" they've seduced into working for them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:32AM
Well, that's good! If they were American nationals guilty of espionage against China, they would only be pretending to commit treason, instead of actually doing it, like these poor bastards.