That fact and others reinforced the theory that China had managed to eavesdrop on the communications between agents and their CIA handlers. Information about sources is so highly compartmentalized that Lee would not have known their identities. He was indicted in May of this year on a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage.īut Lee’s alleged betrayal alone could not explain all the damage that occurred in China during 20, the former officials said.
Court documents suggest Lee was in contact with his handlers at the Ministry of State Security through at least 2011.Ĭhinese authorities paid Lee hundreds of thousands of dollars for his efforts, according to the documents. counterintelligence officials identified Lee, the former CIA officer who had worked extensively in Beijing, as China’s likely informant.
The investigators concluded that a “confluence and combination of events” had wiped out the spy network, according to one of the former officials.Įventually, U.S. During the investigation, the task force identified three potential causes of the failure, the former officials said: A possible agent had provided Chinese authorities with information about the CIA asset network, some of the CIA’s spy work had been sloppy and might have been detected by Chinese authorities, and the communications system had been compromised. When the intelligence breach became known, the CIA formed a special task force along with the FBI to figure out what went wrong. One of the former officials said the last CIA case officer to have meetings with sources in China distributed large sums of cash to the agents who remained behind, hoping the money would help them flee. Eventually, rescue operations were mounted, and several sources managed to make their way out of China. intelligence officials were “shellshocked,” said one former official. The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to requests for comment.Īt first, U.S. The CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency declined to comment for this story.
The New York Times, which first reported the story last year, put the number at “more than a dozen.” All the CIA assets detained by Chinese intelligence around this time were eventually killed, the former officials said. The former officials also said the real number of CIA assets and those in their orbit executed by China during the two-year period was around 30, though some sources spoke of higher figures. “When things started going bad, they went bad fast.” The Ministry of State Security were always pulling in the right people,” one of the officials said. “You could tell the Chinese weren’t guessing. Federal prosecutors indicted Lee earlier this year in connection with the affair.īut the penetration of the communication system seems to account for the speed and accuracy with which Chinese authorities moved against the CIA’s China-based assets. Other factors played a role as well, including China’s alleged recruitment of former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee around the same time. The former official described the attitude of those in the agency who worked on China at the time as “invincible.” “The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable,” said one of the officials who, like the others, declined to be named discussing sensitive information. The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the online environment was considerably less hazardous, and apparently underestimated China’s ability to penetrate it. Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials. How were the Chinese able to roll up the network? But since then, a question has loomed over the entire debacle.
It was considered one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades: Over a two-year period starting in late 2010, Chinese authorities systematically dismantled the agency’s network of agents across the country, executing dozens of suspected U.S.
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