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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 22 2017, @06:57PM (2 children)
China can't afford to listen in on every restaurant in the country.
They bugged that restaurant because they knew a spy would be likely to go there. They wanted to discover who else was involved and to learn about methods, targets, etc.
How did they know a spy would likely go there? That is where our insecurity comes in. Get the names of a few spies by hacking our Secretary of state, follow them, and discover many more spies.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday May 22 2017, @11:13PM
Or as the second paragraph I quoted suggests, it's possible "the Chinese had hacked the covert communications channel".
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday May 23 2017, @12:44AM
> Get the names of a few spies by hacking our Secretary of state, follow them [...]
That could happen: the Secretary of State's communications might mention details of people who work at U.S. embassies, which CIA agents often do. However, there are other ways that such people could be identified. For example, the embassy itself could be put under observation, and people could be observed as they left it or entered it. Another way would be to require foreign visitors to identify themselves with a passport when they enter the country, and perhaps require them to obtain a visa. Just going by what Wikipedia says, the PRC requires holders of U.S. diplomatic passports to obtain a visa (note the grey colouring on the map and the absence of the United States from the list of exempt countries).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_policy_of_China#Visa-free_for_diplomatic.2C_official.2C_and.2For_service_passports [wikipedia.org]
From the little I know of the workings of the CIA, I assume they minimise the amount of information they provide to the State Department regarding the Chinese people who co-operate with the CIA. "Need to know basis" would be the watch-words, I assume.