How China defeated US intelligence: the US can not understand why
"The Honey Man" goes hunting
As China developed and became a powerful power, Washington kept a close watch on what was happening in that country. By the end of the past decade, the CIA had exhaustive information about the work of the Chinese government. She came straight from the corridors of power, where the Americans managed to introduce the agents. Some of the informants were officials, disillusioned with a state riddled with corruption. There were those who were simply bought out.
But the flow of intelligence from the Middle Kingdom began to dry out, and in 2011 at the CIA headquarters realized a very serious problem: the sources of information disappeared one after another.
The US special services created a special group of particularly valuable and high-ranking officers of the FBI and the CIA. In a tightly classified headquarters in Northern Virginia, they analyzed every operation, scrutinized all the staff of the US Embassy in Beijing - regardless of diplomatic rank.
According to some reports, this operation was given the codename Honey Badger, which means "honey-man" (he is also a bald badger, or ratel, a rare exotic animal from the family of cunies, a fearless and aggressive predator, practically without natural enemies).
Betrayal or hacking?
We considered two main versions. First - in the depths of American intelligence, a mole was wound up, which merges Beijing information about the intelligence network in China. The second - Chinese hackers cracked the encrypted communication system.
At about the same time, the counterintelligence of the PRC exposed a surveillance system organized by the US National Security Agency (NSA) from Taiwan. And the CIA agents went to the American student in Shanghai, Glenn Shriver, who for money collected information of a defensive nature for the Chinese intelligence. To edify American students studying abroad, the FBI even released a video telling of Shriver's betrayal.
Comparing these facts, the investigators tended to the version of the pro mole. True, the most authoritative American counterintelligence agent Mark Kelton, who led the group, doubted this. Perhaps partly because he was a close friend of the CIA officer Brian Kelly, whom the FBI mistakenly suspected of working for Russia in the 1990s.
But in favor of the second, "hacker" version, said the speed and accuracy with which the Chinese special services went out to American informants. In addition, according to the organizers of the reconnaissance network, no person in the US, no matter how high the level of access to classified information he possessed, could not have information about all the agents that China had so successfully hunted.
Scent lost
During the investigation, the picture loomed ugly: having achieved notable successes in China, the CIA staff relaxed, lost vigilance and neglected the rules of conspiracy. Agents in Beijing almost did not change the routes of movement and appointed secret meetings in the same places - just a gift of the network of outdoor surveillance operating in the country. Some US intelligence officers communicated with informers in restaurants that were under the hood of the secret services - where microphones were mounted in each table, and the waiters worked for counterintelligence.
In addition, the secret communication system Covcom, which used the network of agents, according to experts, was very primitive, and also went online. In fact, it copied the Middle East system, where the network environment is less dangerous. The ability of the Chinese hackers is clearly underestimated. The investigation team carried out penetration tests and found that the system contained a fatal error: entering it, one could access a much wider secret communication system through which the CIA interacted with an agent network around the world.
For the first time about this espionage story in May last year told The New York Times . Anonymous officials at different times called journalists different numbers of losses - from 12 to 20 people. Then the number increased to 30 - so many agents and informers since 2010, American intelligence has lost in China. Some agents managed to evacuate from the country.
Mole, yes, not that
In parallel, a version of the mole was developed. In March 2017, it became known about the arrest of State Department employee Candice Kleinborn - during an interview with the investigation team, she did not mention contacts with Chinese officials. In her bank account, money came from China, officials of the PRC showered her with gifts, among which were the iPhone, a laptop, a fully furnished apartment and much more. But Kleinborn did not admit her guilt, and she could not prove that she had disclosed information about American agents.
In January of this year, 53-year-old Jerry Chun Shin Li was detained at the New York airport . An ethnic Chinese, a US citizen, served in the US Armed Forces in the 1980s, and since 1994 worked in the CIA, where he had access to classified documents. In 2007, he retired and went with his family to Hong Kong, settled in an auction house, co-owner of which is an influential Chinese party functionary.
All this time, the US intelligence services watched him and in 2012 could lure him to the US. After searching the number in which he stopped, they found two notebooks: one with phones and addresses, the other with detailed information about the CIA agents working under cover. There were listed the real names, the dates of meetings with the connected, the address of the safe houses.
After five interrogations, Li was for some reason left at large and allowed to return to Hong Kong. They arrested him only six years later, accusing him of stealing classified information. No evidence to indicate that he was passing information to the Chinese special services, the investigation could not be found. In addition, the data he finds do not allow us to make an unambiguous conclusion that he was the one who failed the American network in China.
The consequences are catastrophic
Betrayal, hackers, own carelessness or all taken together - the CIA and the FBI do not know what exactly destroyed the American intelligence network in China. Do not even know how deeply the Chinese penetrated into the system of American special services.
The CIA is particularly concerned about whether Beijing has shared this information, as well as access to Covcom with Moscow. Just at the time when the American intelligence network collapsed in China, several agents working in Russia stopped communicating.
In any case, the failure is catastrophic. In the United States recognize that the restoration of the destroyed network will drag on for many years. Or will not take place at all.
According to the number of losses with this failure, the CIA can be compared only with the failure of dozens of American agents in the USSR. Then it was all about betrayal - American agent was handed in by FBI agent Robert Hanssen and head of the CIA's counter-intelligence unit Aldrich Ames. Both were recruited by the KGB in the 1970s and 1980s.
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