The Agency’s carelessness in protecting its own agents reveals the cynicism of the US government’s treatment of whistleblowers.
Reuters recently published new reporting on the story of one of the worst U.S. intelligence failures in decades. From approximately 2010 to 2013, dozens of CIA informants in China, Iran, and elsewhere were rounded up and executed, jailed, or flipped to double agents. In Iran and China, almost the entirety of the CIA’s network in two of its top-priority countries are reported to have been exposed.
Some in the U.S. government seemed to try to pin much of the blame on a betrayal by CIA officer Jerry Lee, who was later prosecuted and pleaded guilty to spying on behalf of the Chinese government. But Lee’s alleged espionage could not account for all the sources blown.
In a series of articles published by the New York Times, Foreign Policy, and Yahoo! News, another explanation emerged: an astonishing laxity of source protection at the CIA itself. The reporting outlined several lapses in basic tradecraft (which included sending new recruits to meet at locations known to be under close foreign surveillance), but most catastrophic was the (not so) secret communications system the CIA used with these sources. Even if there had not been a mole, it seems hard to believe that the slapdash system could have long evaded the sophisticated counter-intelligence capabilities of the Chinese and Iranian governments.
Essentially, the CIA had set up a system to embed a...
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