BBC: China crippled CIA by killing US sources, says New York Times - Polidicks

[URL="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39989142"]http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-39989142[/URL] [QUOTE]Up to 20 CIA informants were killed or imprisoned by the Chinese government between 2010 and 2012, the New York Times reports, damaging US information-gathering in the country for years. It is not clear whether the CIA was hacked or whether a mole helped the Chinese to identify the agents, officials told the paper. They said one of the informants was shot in the courtyard of a government building as a warning to others. The CIA did not comment on the report. Four former CIA officials spoke to the paper, telling it that information from sources deep inside the Chinese government bureaucracy started to dry up in 2010. Informants began to disappear in early 2011. The CIA and FBI teamed up to investigate the events in an operation one source said was codenamed Honey Badger. The paper said this investigation had centred on one former CIA operative but there was not enough evidence to arrest him. He now lives in another Asian country. Matt Apuzzo, a New York Times journalist who worked on the story, told the BBC: "One of the really troubling things about this is that we still don't know what happened. "There's a divide within the American government over whether there was a mole inside the CIA or whether this was a tradecraft problem, that the CIA agents got sloppy and got discovered, or whether the Chinese managed to hack communications." The disappearance of so many spies damaged a network it had taken years to build up, the paper reports, and hampered operations for years afterwards, even prompting questions from within the Obama administration as to why intelligence had slowed. Officials said it was one of the worst security breaches of recent years.[/QUOTE]

man, US intelligence agencies really aren't good at their jobs, are they?

[QUOTE=Trebgarta;52255587]They are quite good. But when they are bad it is public and it makes killer stories.[/QUOTE] Pretty much. You don't hear about them when they're doing great.

I think we need to see through this article. It's not why they were caught, or why they were there, but more so, why the fuck are they making this public. 4 sources? It's a public operation. It's worrying.

[QUOTE=download;52255603]Pretty much. You don't hear about them when they're doing great.[/QUOTE] Kinda like the cops.

[QUOTE=Judas;52255577]man, US intelligence agencies really aren't good at their jobs, are they?[/QUOTE] Informants are not US CIA men, they're foreign nationals that CIA pays off to gain information. The prime need the CIA has from these people is more focused on the intel they provide more so than their own safety - because after all, they're foreign nationals.

[QUOTE=Emperor Scorpious II;52255956]The prime need the CIA has from these people is more focused on the intel they provide more so than their own safety - because after all, they're foreign nationals.[/QUOTE] That's seemingly logical on the face of it, but historically it's not true. Defectors and spies aren't, for the most part, stupid; they're not going to offer their services to an intelligence agency with a track record of burning sources. The CIA in particular has gone to great lengths to extract successful informants, such as [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryszard_Kukliński"]Ryszard Kuklinski[/URL], who was exfiltrated along with his family when he was in danger of capture. And when [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Tolkachev"]Adolf Tolkachev[/URL] was caught and executed, it made it much harder for the US to recruit Soviet spies, prompting the manhunt that led to the arrest of [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Lee_Howard"]Edward Lee Howard[/URL]. Even from a purely pragmatic perspective, if you've spent years and enormous amounts of money building up a spy network, you probably want to keep your investment. If extensive networks are disappearing altogether then that's a major problem.