The Chinese Government Killed Over a Dozen CIA Sources from 2010-2012 | Hacker News Reader

The Chinese Government Killed Over a Dozen CIA Sources from 2010-2012

reuters.com

This has all the makings for a screenplay right up my alley. I have the utmost respect for Clandestine Operatives and the conditions and considerations. It's not playing a game on a board with pieces, these are people's lives.

In 2003, I heard about China organ harvesting in its prisons and wrote a short story about it. 10+ years later, I made it into a screenplay. It's a Morality Play.

https://www.scriptrevolution.com/scripts/infamy

The line "We've lost another one" could almost be the goddamn title of my take on events. Nobody wants to make that call.

As noted in the first sentence, this story is based on the NY Times report. The Times article is more comprehensive:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14385359

As per HN Guidelines, "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter."

They are spies right? It is an essential part of the professional risk.

Absolutely.

What makes this newsworthy, though, isn't that the spies are dead-- it's that twelve died in a ~year. Something happened that the CIA wasn't ready for. Take this as a sign of a few possible things-- A) The US may have had a mole, B) China's security apparatus got much much better very quickly, C) The US is complacent in foreign human intelligence, D) Hacking may have killed more people. We're not sure of which one, or if it's any of those things, which leaves us the article-- 12 spies are dead.

or E) They gathered a tremendous amount of information over a long period of time, and played the CIA's game by giving it to them easy. That way more is revealed, and then China executed, no pun intended, the plan all at once when the time seemed right.

But again who knows.

> it's that twelve died in a ~year

Per the original NYT article, it was 2 years: "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."

Original story https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/20/world/asia/china-cia-spie...

Why release this information now?

Perhaps to give the president pause before he blabbers information that will get some operative killed?

Like Oleg Erovinkin?

You say "blabbers" like it's a bad thing. Spies are criminals and they should be caught. Killing isn't very good but at least they should be locked up to protect people from the harm they cause.

It's the NYT so my initial hunch would be verifying sources in duplicate and/or triplicate depending on the claims. This is international spycraft. Not quite Gary Powers getting shot down over the USSR, but very high stakes nonetheless.

The NYT is not all that. Read with care, and you'll notice a lot of stuff is couched, and rather than statements of fact, there are statements of fact about statements. For example, notice how many times the word pair "officials said" appears in the article.

In other words, yes it may be a fact that a source said X, but a lot of people read that as "NYT said X" which is not at all what NYT is saying.

What you have described to me is a "bounce house" of dealing with the world, so, my only question to you is how much are you paid per word for the Government service you are representing? I'm inquiring for the sake of market value. I certainly don't want to become a shill and be underpaid for my services.

Ignoring the silly reddit-style rhetoric and getting to your underlying implied suspicion: On the contrary, the perspective I was offering, if understood, would tend to deflate the value of statements that the government spoon feeds to the media, often intentionally and through anonymous officials.

The problem is that many people don't read the NYT literally. They read the statements as vetted statements of fact about the matters at hand, instead of vetted statements of fact about statements.

The NYT knows this. The government knows this. So they use it to advance their agendas. Not that their interests are often aligned, but they sometimes are. And when their interests are not aligned, they still try to use each other and use the basic misunderstanding many people have about facts about statements versus facts about events. I do believe the NYT tries to be factual when a close reading is done.

The former PM of Kosovo, Ramush Haradinaj, had 9 witnesses against him killed while he was on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in the Hague.

It is a growing trend for extrajudicial killings to occur at the hands of the state (think Russia and journalists, Duerte and alleged druggies) for pretty much any reason.

What a sad and complex world we live in.

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