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China hunted down ‘at least a dozen’ US spies: report

US spies paid with their lives when Chinese authorities swooped.

US spies paid with their lives when Chinese authorities swooped. Photo: AAP

China’s counter-intelligence agencies “systematically dismantled” CIA spying operations starting in late 2010, according to bombshell reports in the US.

Quoting multiple intelligence sources, The New York Times reported that Beijing’s concerted sweep of suspected Washington agents resulted in at least a dozen CIA sources being executed or imprisoned over the next two years

The newspaper cites 10 current and former US officials, who describe the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. They spoke on condition of anonymity.

The report published Saturday says US intelligence and law enforcement agencies scrambled to stem the damage, but were bitterly divided over the cause of the breach.

Some investigators were convinced a mole had burrowed deep within the CIA, while others suspected China had hacked the covert system used to communicate with foreign sources.

What US intelligence sources agree on, according to the Times, is that China’s security services made a point to let it be known informers could expect no mercy.

According to three of the officials who spoke to the paper, one US intelligence asset was marched into the courtyard of a government building and executed with a bullet to the head as his colleagues watched.

While the CIA has declined to make any comment on the record, multiple unnamed sources were frank in describing the immense damage done to both US intelligence-gathering on the ground and the near-paranoid uncertainty that dogged the agency as agent after agent vanished.

The CIA’s leading theory is that its agents were betrayed by a mole working at the agency’s sprawling headquarters in Langley, Virginia. However, unable to amass sufficient hard evidence to arrest and charge the suspect, he was fired from his job and quickly fled the country.

The Times noted that China had penetrated Taiwan’s intelligence service, perhaps giving it access to information drawn from clandestine sources and shared by the two nations.

Combined with revelations about US intelligence methods exposed by Wikileaks “document dumps” and rogue operative Edward Snowden’s earlier revelations these snippets of information may have formed parts of an intelligence jigsaw Beijong’s counterintelligence were then able to assemble.

According to the Times, that penetration was both deep and detailed — including the names Chinese nationals believed to be worth cultivating as sources.

A top secret internal review was also critical of US methods on the ground, noting that the “handlers” of secret US contacts would often meet them repeatedly at the same rendezvous points, making it easy for Beijing to wait, watch and record who turned up.
–with AAP

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