Kelley’s mistreatment in meetings during the China episode, former colleagues say, and said he would not accuse someone without ironclad evidence. officer who in the 1990s was wrongly suspected by the F.B.I. Kelton had been close friends with Brian J. But efforts to gather enough evidence to arrest him failed, and he is now living in another Asian country, current and former officials said.īut the C.I.A.’s top spy hunter, Mark Kelton, resisted the mole theory, at least initially, former officials say. The mole hunt eventually zeroed in on a former agency operative who had worked in the C.I.A.’s division overseeing China, believing he was most likely responsible for the crippling disclosures. Their debates were punctuated with macabre phone calls - “We lost another one” - and urgent questions from the Obama administration wondering why intelligence about the Chinese had slowed. Others suspected a traitor in the C.I.A., a theory that agency officials were at first reluctant to embrace - and that some in both agencies still do not believe.
#EU4 SPY NETWORK KILL CRACKED#
Some investigators believed the Chinese had cracked the encrypted method that the C.I.A. Nearly every employee at the American Embassy was scrutinized, no matter how high ranking. One former senior American official said the investigation had been code-named Honey Badger.Īs more and more sources vanished, the operation took on increased urgency. Working out of a secret office in Northern Virginia, they began analyzing every operation being run in Beijing. opened a joint investigation run by top counterintelligence officials at both agencies. By early 2011, senior agency officers realized they had a problem: Assets in China, one of their most precious resources, were disappearing. investigates possible ties between President Trump’s campaign and Russia, the unsettled nature of the China investigation demonstrates the difficulty of conducting counterespionage investigations into sophisticated spy services like those in Russia and China.īut by the end of the year, the flow of information began to dry up. is trying to figure out how some of its most sensitive documents were leaked onto the internet two months ago by WikiLeaks, and the F.B.I. considers spying in China one of its top priorities, but the country’s extensive security apparatus makes it exceptionally hard for Western spy services to develop sources there.Īt a time when the C.I.A. The previously unreported episode shows how successful the Chinese were in disrupting American spying efforts and stealing secrets years before a well-publicized breach in 2015 gave Beijing access to thousands of government personnel records, including intelligence contractors.
and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years. The number of American assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building - a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.Īssessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging.
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 C.I.A.’s sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.īut there was no disagreement about the damage. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A.
It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. 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.Ĭurrent and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. WASHINGTON - The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A.
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