Is the United States up to the job?
Bill Gertz, a national security correspondent for The Washington Times who writes frequently about China, offers a rundown of a new MITRE Corp. report on how America’s intelligence agencies are failing to meet the wide-ranging and omnipresent challenge presented by the PRC (“U.S. intelligence agencies ill-suited for China competition, study warns,” January 6, 2024).
The intelligence community “is not positioned optimally to tackle the full spectrum of competition with the PRC,” wrote report author Margaret Stromecki, a former senior U.S. intelligence analyst and now a MITRE systems engineer, using the acronym for People’s Republic of China….
China “is the only U.S. competitor with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military and technological power to do so,” the [report] stated, adding that the threat posed by Moscow “lacks the across-the-spectrum capabilities of the PRC.”
Intelligence also needs to improve monitoring of China’s ability to project its influence globally. Those activities include building military bases around the world, creating economic dependence by foreign states through economic development programs, and using propaganda and disinformation to improve the image of the communist state….
The U.S. intelligence community “can and must pivot to meet this new challenge,” the report concluded.
Toward the end of his article, Gertz almost incidentally mentions the many spies that the Central Intelligence Agency lost in China a decade or so ago. A detail not included in Stromecki’s report.
According to U.S. officials, the CIA lost most of its recruited agents in China beginning around 2010 as a result of a communications failure and also through a former agency official who spied for China.
The MITRE report made no mention of the agent losses. CIA Director William Burns, however, said during a recent security conference that the agency is attempting to build up its networks after the loss of so many intelligence assets inside China.
According to a May 2017 New York Times report (“Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations”):
The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. 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.
Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. 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. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.
But there was no disagreement about the damage. 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. 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.
Gertz says that the fiasco was caused by a communications failure and a double agent. In 2017, the Times disagreed. In saying that investigators were bitterly divided over the cause, the Times reporter seemed to suggest that the explanation was either a hack into the CIA system or a CIA mole.
However, a year later, an account of the fiasco by Zach Dorfman appeared in Foreign Policy that supports Gertz’s understanding (“Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents,” August 15, 2018).
Over a two-year period starting in late 2010, Chinese authorities systematically dismantled the agency’s network of agents across the country, executing dozens of suspected U.S. spies. But since then, a question has loomed over the entire debacle.
How were the Chinese able to roll up the network?
Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials. The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the online environment was considerably less hazardous, and apparently underestimated China’s ability to penetrate it….
Other factors played a role as well, including China’s alleged recruitment of former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee around the same time. Federal prosecutors indicted Lee earlier this year in connection with the affair. But the penetration of the communication system seems to account for the speed and accuracy with which Chinese authorities moved against the CIA’s China-based assets.
So it seems that Gertz is right: hacking plus a double agent exposed the recruits in China. To which causes may be added at least a third, the agency’s sloppiness and complacency.
According to Dorfman, after the debacle CIA agents soon began to rely less on penetrable Internet-based systems when dealing with sources in China and more on in-person meetings.
