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China Compromise - 2010-12

In May 2018, the US Justice Department charged a CIA officer with having spied for China and aided the Chinese government. Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, allegedly gave Chinese intel officers "classified information, including but not limited to names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees." The Chinese government reportedly conducted a "systematic dismantling" of the undercover American spy network in China, starting in 2010. "Lee was at the center of a mole hunt in which some intelligence officials believed that he had betrayed the United States, but others thought that the Chinese government had hacked the CIA's covert communications used to talk to foreign sources of information," the New York Times reported.

A former CIA officer suspected by investigators of helping China dismantle United States spying operations and identify informants was arrested upon his arrival at JFK Airport in New York 16 January 2018. The reported collapse of the US spy network in China was described by the New York Times as one of the American government's worst intelligence failures in recent years. Former CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee, aka Zhen Cheng Li, a 13-year veteran of the CIA (1994-2007), was accused of “unlawful retention of national defense information.” According to court documents, Lee began working for CIA as a case officer in 1994, maintained a Top Secret clearance and signed numerous non-disclosure agreements during his tenure at CIA.

FBI agents conducted court-authorized searches of Lee’s room and luggage, and found that Lee was in unauthorized possession of materials relating to the national defense. Specifically, agents found two small books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.

China systematically dismantled CIA spying efforts in the country from 2010, killing or jailing more than a dozen covert sources, in a deep setback to US intelligence there, according to a report by The New York Times 21 May 2017. The Times, quoting 10 current and former US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity, described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades.

According to the article, "Investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. 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." Of the damage inflicted on what had been one of the most productive US spy networks, there was no doubt that at least a dozen CIA sources were killed between late 2010 and the end of 2012, it said.

"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 CIA," the report said. In all, 18 to 20 CIA sources in China were either killed or imprisoned, according to two former senior American officials quoted.

The breach was considered particularly damaging, with the number of assets lost rivaling those in the Soviet Union and Russia who perished after information passed to Moscow by spies Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, the report said. The CIA's mole hunt in China, following the severe losses to its network there, was intense and urgent. Nearly every employee of the US Embassy in Beijing was scrutinised at one point, the newspaper said.

The Chinese activities began to emerge in 2010, when the American spy agency had been getting high quality information about the Chinese government from sources deep inside the bureaucracy, including Chinese upset by the Beijing government's corruption, four former officials told the Times. The information began to dry up by the end of the year and the sources began disappearing in early 2011, the report said. As more sources were killed, the FBI and the CIA began a joint investigation of the breach, examining all operations run in Beijing and every employee of the US Embassy there.

Global Times stated "If this article is telling the truth, we would like to applaud China's anti-espionage activities. Not only was the CIA's spy network dismantled, but Washington had no idea what happened and which part of the spy network had gone wrong. It can be taken as a sweeping victory. Perhaps it means even if the CIA makes efforts to rebuild its spy network in China, it could face the same result. As for one source being shot in a government courtyard, that is a purely fabricated story, most likely a piece of American-style imagination based on ideology.

"It not only defines the moral standards of spies based its own national interests, but also tries to make these standards universal. The NYT report seems to be a white-knuckle beginning for a new version of Mission: Impossible: American spies who worked in China disappeared, and some of them died miserably. However, no one knew the reason for their deaths. The journalists who wrote the report must have been deeply addicted to the franchise.

"The CIA has apparently increased its espionage activities in China, which will inevitably lead to China simultaneously strengthening its counterintelligence efforts. No matter how Americans see it, international law will affirm that China's anti-espionage activities are just and legal, while the CIA's spying is illegitimate."

In 2016 China launched an anti-spying effort at a time when two high-profile criminal cases were making headlines. In April 2016, the Chinese government sentenced to death a computer technician for helping foreign spies. The computer technician's name is Huang Yu. He was accused of taking $700,000 over the course of almost 10 years to pass confidential information to a foreign country. His mother and brother-in-law were also punished for helping him. Huang appeared on national television with a message: turn yourself in if you are spying for a foreign country. “It’s better for your family and for you,” he said. The Chinese government prosecuted another man for stealing state secrets. He was a Canadian who operated a café near China’s border with North Korea.