>>5976911

https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/08/15/botched-cia-communications-system-helped-blow-cover-chinese-agents-intelligence/

Precisely how the system was breached remains unclear. The Ministry of State Security might have run a double agent who was given the communication platform by his CIA handler. Another possibility is that Chinese authorities identified a U.S. agent—perhaps through information provided by Lee—and seized that person’s computer. Alternatively, authorities might have identified the system through a pattern analysis of suspicious online activities.

China was so determined to crack the system that it had set up a special task force composed of members of the Ministry of State Security and the Chinese military’s signals directorate (roughly equivalent to the NSA), one former official said.

Once one person was identified as a CIA asset, Chinese intelligence could then track the agent’s meetings with handlers and unravel the entire network. (Some CIA assets whose identities became known to the Ministry of State Security were not active users of the communications system, the sources said.)

One of the former officials said the agency had “strong indications” that China shared its findings with Russia, where some CIA assets were using a similar covert communications system. Around the time the CIA’s source network in China was being eviscerated, multiple sources in Russia suddenly severed their relationship with their CIA handlers, according to an NBC News report that aired in January—and confirmed by this former official.

The failure of the communications system has reignited a debate within the intelligence community about the merits of older, lower-tech methods for covert interactions with sources, according to the former officials.

There is an inherent paradox to covert communications systems, one of the former officials said: The easier a system is to use, the less secure it is.

The former officials said CIA officers operating in China since the debacle had reverted to older methods of communication, including interacting surreptitiously in person with sources. Such methods can be time-consuming and carry their own risks.

>>5976911

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spies-espionage.html

The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. opened a joint investigation run by top counterintelligence officials at both agencies. Working out of a secret office in Northern Virginia, they began analyzing every operation being run in Beijing. One former senior American official said the investigation had been code-named Honey Badger.

As more and more sources vanished, the operation took on increased urgency. Nearly every employee at the American Embassy was scrutinized, no matter how high ranking. Some investigators believed the Chinese had cracked the encrypted method that the C.I.A. used to communicate with its assets. 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.

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But the C.I.A.’s top spy hunter, Mark Kelton, resisted the mole theory, at least initially, former officials say. Mr. Kelton had been close friends with Brian J. Kelley, a C.I.A. officer who in the 1990s was wrongly suspected by the F.B.I. of being a Russian spy. The real traitor, it turned out, was Mr. Hanssen. Mr. Kelton often mentioned Mr. Kelley’s mistreatment in meetings during the China episode, former colleagues say, and said he would not accuse someone without ironclad evidence.

Those who rejected the mole theory attributed the losses to sloppy American tradecraft at a time when the Chinese were becoming better at monitoring American espionage activities in the country. Some F.B.I. agents became convinced that C.I.A. handlers in Beijing too often traveled the same routes to the same meeting points, which would have helped China’s vast surveillance network identify the spies in its midst.

Hannsen mentioned in 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/world/asia/spy-arrest-china-ron-rockwell-hansen.html