In just a few years, Chinese intelligence was able to almost completely crush the US intelligence network in the country. Dozens of illegal spies and informers received harsh prison sentences or were executed. RIA Novosti columnist Vladimir Ardaev writes about this in his material.
The US has already called this situation the biggest failure of the CIA since the end of the Cold War. But the worst thing is different: Americans can not understand exactly how this was done.
History of events
Over the past few decades, US intelligence agencies have had almost complete information about the processes taking place in China. She came from numerous agents recruited on the basis of dissatisfaction with the authorities or simply working for money. But around the beginning of this decade, this high-flow began to dry up: sources of intelligence began to disappear one after another.
Realizing the seriousness of the problem, the Americans created a special group to solve it, which included the most experienced officers of the CIA and the FBI. Employees of the American Embassy in Beijing were especially attentively examined - they were checked in search of a traitor, regardless of their rank and merit. However, apparently, these efforts have not yielded results.
"Mole" or Chinese hackers?
Worst of all, Americans still do not understand what caused the failure. There are two versions: a high-ranking traitor in the intelligence community or breaking into a secret communication system, through which contacts with agents are made.
Initially, they tended toward the version of the mole, but experienced American counterintelligence officer Mark Kelton, who led the group, doubted that. The fact is that not a single officer of the special services, whatever position he held, had access to such an array of information. The speed with which the Chinese cleaned American informants also speaks in favor of the hacking version.
In general, the investigation showed a very unsightly picture. The CIA officers, having achieved obvious success in China, relaxed and began to neglect even the simplest security measures. Routes of movement and places of meetings with agents remained virtually unchanged, which greatly facilitated the work of Chinese counterintelligence. In addition, the secret communication system itself, which was used to communicate with agents, was distinguished by primitiveness, and also had access to the Internet.
Further more. Later, fatal errors were discovered in it, which, when hacked, gain access to the global system that the CIA used to communicate with agents on a global scale.
This spy story was first made public in May of last year, the newspaper The New York Times reported. The CIA's loss figures are called different: from 10 to 30 unmasked agents. Some of them, allegedly, the Americans managed to evacuate from China.
Possible consequences of an epic failure
Regardless of the reasons for what happened, this "file" of American intelligence can be called catastrophic. The United States has already recognized that the elimination of its consequences will drag on for years. The worst thing in this situation is that Langley does not know how deeply and seriously the Chinese have penetrated the intelligence system.
There is another aspect of what happened. Americans worry that Beijing will share completely secret information with Russia. It was reported that it was during the period of failure of the Chinese network that several Russian CIA agents stopped contacting.
In terms of the losses incurred, this failure can only be compared with the betrayal of the FBI officer Robert Hanssen and the head of the CIA counterintelligence unit Aldrich Ames, who were recruited by the KGB in the 1970-1980s. They issued dozens of American agents who worked in the Soviet Union.
