The Chinese government systematically dismantled CIA spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward, The New York Times reported citing four former officials.
Some were convinced that a mole within the CIA had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the CIA used to communicate with its foreign sources.
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 CIA’s sources. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building.
The first signs of trouble emerged in 2010. At the time, the quality of the CIA’s information about the inner workings of the Chinese government was the best it had been for years, the result of recruiting sources deep inside the bureaucracy in Beijing.
But by the end of the year, the flow of information began to dry up. By early 2011, senior agency officers realized they had a problem: Assets in China, one of their most precious resources, were disappearing.
The FBI and the CIA opened a joint investigation run by top counterintelligence officials at both agencies. They began analyzing every operation being run in Beijing. One former senior American official said the investigation had been code-named Honey Badger.
As more and more sources vanished, the operation took on increased urgency.
The mole hunt eventually zeroed in on a former agency operative who had worked in the CIA’s division overseeing China, believing he was most likely responsible for the crippling disclosures. But efforts to gather enough evidence to arrest him failed, and he is now living in another Asian country, current and former officials said.
This carelessness, coupled with the possibility that the Chinese had hacked the covert communications channel, would explain many, if not all, of the disappearances and deaths, some former officials said.
The CIA and the FBI both declined to comment.
