Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations | Hacker News Reader

Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations

nytimes.com

254 pointsgeorgecmu168 comments

From my readings of CIA memoirs and spy novels, CIA Agents (aka sources or informants) are really foreign people reporting information to the CIA Officers which are US Government employees.

If these were US government workers reporting secrets to the Chinese I would expect imprisonment, etc. I guess it isn't too shocking they would do the same, albeit more cruelly, to their own traitors.

There was a post recently about how easy it was for foreign governments, in the 1970's, to track the actual CIA Officers on station at an embassy. TL;DR: Reading job titles and observing who they hung out with was one way. Also mentioned was that CIA officers rarely intermingled with actual Diplomats and support staff often knew who was who because of secret areas of the embassy that were off limits.

The article mentions a potential hack into the systems but it could have been good old spy-craft by following people and noticing patterns to find the sources.

> From my readings of CIA memoirs and spy novels, CIA Agents (aka sources or informants) are really foreign people reporting information to the CIA Officers which are US Government employees

Yep. If you haven't read it, the Billion Dollar Spy details the efforts the CIA made in Moscow during the Cold War. Pretty good read.

https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Spy-Espionage-Betrayal...

> CIA Agents are really foreign people reporting back

Definitely: "one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building"

If you're running a US-agent embedded spy ring, your ring's members don't hang out together. They probably don't even know of each others' existences.

> The article mentions a potential hack into the systems but it could have been good old spy-craft by following people and noticing patterns to find the sources.

I suspect that is the case, too. Especially this:

> Some officers met their sources at a restaurant where Chinese agents had planted listening devices, former officials said, and even the waiters worked for Chinese intelligence.

I sometimes go to some fancy and downtown restaurants in the Eastern European capital where I live, and you very often can see politicians there and people you very often see on TV as having had problems with the law. I often joke with one of my work-colleagues about how most probably all the restaurant tables in those kind of places are wired. It doesn't help that the most fancy party place in the city is partially owned by the daughter of a the director of the Security Services back in the 1990s. All these places are also filled with foreign businessmen and I suspect there are also people working for foreign embassies.

While I used to live and eat out in the poorer parts of the city I never, never saw what looked to be foreign persons eating at those restaurants. They are all gravitating around the same area in downtown city. I suspect a very similar thing is happening in China and in other countries' capitals around the world. Most of the Western diplomats who are also carrying intelligence activity on the side don't seem very capable of just blending in in a foreign environment.

Ok, since we both know the city, which big restaurant is owned by the blue-eyed daughter?

Club Loft and Anca Magureanu, the daughter of former SRI director Virgil Magureanu. I'm on mobile and am too lazy to link here, but the info is easily searchable.

> I sometimes go to some fancy and downtown restaurants in the Eastern European capital where I live, and you very often can see politicians there and people you very often see on TV as having had problems with the law. I often joke with one of my work-colleagues about how most probably all the restaurant tables in those kind of places are wired.

Lol, you don't know how close to truth you are. It has actually happened already in Poland in 2014 - a high-end restaurant in Warsaw, where ruling party's politicians liked to hang out, was wired and the recording subsequently leaked to the press. It was one of the factors that led to this party falling out of favor with voters and the "right-wing" opposition taking over.

But if you can guess that the place is wired, surely they should too?

"Candace Marie Claiborne, accused of lying to investigators about her contacts with Chinese officials. ...Chinese agents wired cash into her bank account and showered her with gifts ...iPhone, a laptop and tuition at a Chinese fashion school...fully furnished apartment and a stipend."

Recklessness of this is beyond my comprehension, not just accepting cash but also communication and computing devices like iphone and laptop that may have been tampered with.

Details of the charges and bribery here.

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/state-department-employee-arr...

Unbelievable lapse in judgement.

Check this out: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/05/02/fb...

FBI translator secretly married Islamic State leader

People are cray.

To be fair the dating scene in DC is pretty rough.

Humans are fallible emotional beings

These people are not carefully selected and trained spies, well versed in opsec. More often they would be weak people given to temptations, and finding the source that could provide them with money and other goodies in exchange for access to whatever information they can lay their hands on. Given how many people work for the government, it's hard to expect every one of them to be impervious to bribery. Actually, we know for a fact many of them are not. So the only difference is that in this case foreigners do the bribing.

Otherwise it's nothing new - e.g. when somebody becomes a multimillionare while working for government or makes some spectacularly lucky investments and gets some unexplainably lucrative deals from people needing the influence in the government - it's completely routine. Most of the times they get away with it. So no one could blame a state dept worker for thinking maybe she could get away with it too.

If you look at the cases where people are caught spying for non-ideological reasons, they usually have some issues that compromise their judgement.

The reward vs. risk ratio seems to be way off. You would assume that successful spy would be worth of tens of millions for the risk of spending rest of his/her life in a prison. Usually they settle for smaller sums. They just want to feel important and have a lifestyle and/or feel loved or have sex.

> By 2013, China’s success in identifying C.I.A. agents had been blunted — it is not clear how.

If I can make a software analogy here, this is the least satisfying resolution to a bug in your program. Imagine a devastating but intermittent bug, that simply disappears after a period of time or after innocuous changes to your program. Not knowing what happened or how it "fixed itself" is very frustrating.

Alternate theory: The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. know exactly how they fixed it, but they won't tell The New York Times that part.

Your alternate theory is likely to be the correct one. As a general rule with very few exceptions, read espionage tales published in the popular press for entertainment not accurate information. The first rule of spying is : EVERYBODY. LIES.

Or in fact they have no meaningful agent program, but they want the Chinese to think they do, so they spend vast resources looking for the CIA's sources and randomly arresting the wrong people. How easy would it be to plant cyber evidence on someone these days? Especially with everyone in China running on devices with govt backdoors, it must be easy.

I thought the same thing about your alternate theory. If they did figure out how to fix the problem, they absolutely would not reveal that.

This is historical, being 7 years old. No one knows for sure when the Office of Personnel Management hack began, only that it was detected, by accident in 2015.

This OPM hack is probably the most damaging for the US government's spying efforts, even more than the Snowden disclosures.

Fair point. Information technology needs refreshing every 3-9 years or so (Moore's Law and such, though Moore treads more lightly over algorithms than he does microchips).

People ... need a years to develop, and could potentially provide useful service for decades. Having an entire cohort of agents removed is a substantial blow.

U.S. reliance on technology is so beyond reasonable at this point that, I'd imagine there's the very real, serious liklihood of something on the level of an Enigma/Lorenz cypher botch that gives away the whole country on a platter.

It's something that I've wondered about for a while now, but really, who am I to question such things?

That's an interesting and scary idea, but keep in mind that a lot has happened since WWII. Back then industrial-mechanical cryptography was seen as this magic wand that made all communications completely inscrutable. Then the Polish and British and others went to such crazy lengths building brute-forcing machines, etc, to actually break these ciphers, and since then the idea of an infallible crypto system is out of style.

So I think the strategy is much different and much more durable now. The military designs ciphers to be resistant to theoretical future quantum computer architectures. They fund research every year to prove various properties of crypto systems. And I'll bet there are lots of fallbacks for any critical infrastructure.

nothing is impossible, but it's worth keeping in mind that nsa is the world's largest employer of mathematicians

Every new person makes any crypto system less secure ;)

> even more than the Snowden disclosures.

Snowden took only documents that describe the overall global surveillance infrastructure.

Snowden had access to raw data streams for almost all SIGINT operations. System administrators like Snowden received special "root access like" clearance called PRIVAC (Privileged Access) where people allowed to be exposed to information of any classification, regardless of what their position actually needs, apparently because they are sysadmins and need to see what's going on. Snowden had 'technical' access to live feeds for all active operations, drone feeds and other information regardless of classification all over the world was wider than anyone participating in operations had.

It's not hard to imagine that there are other people with PRIVAC access who are actual spies. Just by observing important stuff and not taking anything compromises the system. If they downloaded some of that stuff, it has been open doors all this time.

Only after Snowdon's revelations NSA has added the two-man rule for sysadmins. Apparently it was too costly before. Increasing the data collection was more important than building the system.

I think there is systemic failure in US/UK intelligence organizations. They constantly emphasize offense over defense even when they know that they are very vulnerable. It's hard to show results for good defensive posture.

FYI even users with low access can view drone feeds.

Access to drone feeds from basically all CIA/DIA operations provides breath of access that compromises the security at completely different level than being part of a operation.

>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.

You would think that a counter-espionage chief would be much more "paranoid". I would guess that in the world of intelligence, getting "ironclad evidence" of something is probably the exception and not the rule.

No, I imagine that the biggest fear a CIA counterintelligence chief has is of becoming the next Angleton.

Although Angleton ultimately was proven correct by Mitroyken.

Imagine the Chinese here were more paranoid and they killed a dozen honest folk instead. They would have not hampered US efforts in the least and only shot themselves in the foot. See why it's not good to be more paranoid?

You have to consider the risks of false positive vs false negative identification.

From a state point of view, a false positive will cost you the life of a citizen - very unfortunate, and a tragedy - but in the end nobody is irreplaceable.

A false negative exposes the state at risk, which affects everybody, possibly leading to catastrophe. In a risk vs reward scenario, it's vastly better to have a false positive vs a false negative.

But this is not an easy decision to make. We are humans, and emotions and empathy are very strong - we don't want to hurt anybody, and normal people are reluctant to hurt other people no matter how logical it seems.

This is why you want a paranoid in charge - somebody that is so afraid of making a disastrous mistake that the emphaty and emotions are suppressed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Nidal_Organization_interna...

It this implying that America's informants in Russia are all being killed right now, or am I reading too much into it?

We (the US) imprison people indefinitely for not turning over encryption keys and passwords.

We search and copy laptops and phones at borders, with no kind of court order.

We put non-dangerous people in jail for weeks because they can't pay $500 bond, even though it costs us more to have them in jail than to just forgo the bond payment.

It was just on 60 Minutes last night that in Cook County IL, people are being held in prison so long before being convicted, that by the time they are convicted, they've already served their sentence, and often have served way more than their sentence.

I can forgive the Chinese for killing or imprisoning US spies. I'm sure we do the same thing or worse. As far as I'm concerned, the US has lost any moral high ground when it comes to imprisonment.

Is there good Sino-Western spy fiction?

i liked spy game, the movie with robert redford and brad pitt.

Who needs fiction, just read up on Kissinger and Mao (and Chiang Kai-shek) and how the two intersect if you want stuff most people wouldn't beleive.

Look into The Tourist/Milo Weaver trilogy by Olen Steinhauer. The third book (An American Spy) is where you'll find the US/Chinese intrigues (and an incident that has a similar ring to it as the above news article). I recommend the full trilogy, as the first two books set up the third.

You might also try The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré. Set primarily in Hong Kong, it's part spy novel, part sweeping tour of Southeast Asia just as the last dominos are falling to Communism in the 1970s. Although it's technically in the George Smiley series, I don't think you really need to read those in any particular order.

Steinhauer if you like beach reads/page turners. Le Carré if you like a more literary slow-burner.

I've read just about everything by Le Carré, including, of course, The Honourable Schoolboy. I might check out Steinhauer. I think I read something by him, but can't remember what.

Night Heron is a fun read. Haven't gotten around to the sequels though.

Also, Tiger Trap was an interesting nonfiction read on US-China spying.

Interesting how American citizens / informants are seduced and reckless, whereas Chinese sources act out of worries about corruption.

E7ther biases, or possibly about to change sharply in age of Trump.

We only know about the informants who get clapped, there's perhaps not enough information available to make pronouncements.

Have you ever seen the anti spying posters in china? They totally are oriented around seduction and recklessness (Chinese girls are warned about handsome foreigners, and so on).

I suppose, I expect more from NYT

Honeypots are literally the oldest trick in the book. Everybody uses them.

> By 2013, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. concluded that China’s success in identifying C.I.A. agents had been blunted

how can the CIA conclude the problem is resolved when they have no idea what the problem is? this sounds exactly like a government report to CYA (all too familiar if you've ever worked for the USG).

If they knew, would they tell the New York Times?

Maybe there was never a problem, maybe this is to make the Chinese think that they got the right people, I mean the NYT is not the CIAs therapist what good is it telling your top secret problems to the press unless you have an angle. But all the same it was a fascinating read.

Reading between the lines, a lot of the mole suspicion seems to focus on ethnically Chinese CIA employees.

Between speaking the language fluently and not sticking out when meeting sources, it makes sense to me there would be a lot of ethnically Chinese employees in the spying-on-china division.

Why do people keep acting like we are living in a poorly scripted movie from the 70s? Its a small world. Can it really not be civilized?

huh, can't believe no one has ever thought of this before

Is it legal to spy on another country's government? This article suggests it is legal. Does the US government let chineese operatives work in the US government?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_espionage_in_the_Uni...

It goes both ways. Geopolitical peers and adversaries always spy on each other.

non-survivor bias? We don't know how many spies remain undetected.

Every time I read news like this, I remember that nyt has many choices of what to publish and they CHOSED to publish this. Why? It feels like this article is designed to increase sympathy for the CIA.

    > they CHOSED to publish this. Why?

Is "they think people will click on it" too complicated an answer?

Doesn't the article make the CIA seem less competent instead?

From the article:

> 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.

Hillary Clinton was secretary of State from 2009 to early 2013. In October 2010, she traveled to Vietnam for the ASEAN conference while using a personal, older model Blackberry. This timeframe also overlaps with her personal email server.

> In Vietnam in particular, analysts say, there’s a concern Chinese government hackers could pull information from the Vietnamese government-owned telecom — either through an intelligence-sharing agreement with Vietnam or because Vietnamese officials make little effort to keep Chinese spies out of their networks.

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/hillary-clintons-perso...

Wow, a piece i could read on the NYT. I hope it's not just me, reading this thinking; this story reads so much differently than their typical Trump hit piece. It doesn't take a side, it doesn't try to fire you up, it just informs.

I like being informed. This story is incredible - it shows a massive failure of the US system. The most likely source, a leak inside. A leak they were never truly able to detect.

It bodes for sloppiness. The incredible level of sheer sloppiness we are seeing from the deep state is beyond incredible.

If the reality is the intel services need a bad and serious reshaping, and we are watching them actively try to avoid that possibility. This article exposes a little more truth of the matter.

Our spies have been assassinated. Our most sensitive databases breached. Our own weapons stolen and used for bullshit crap coded ransom-ware. I would hope this story sticks around and becomes a talking point, but the media will strangle this out.

It's really terrifying how much the deep state seems to be unraveling.

The so-called "deep state" is just a Trumpian label for "any bureaucracy once gets in the way of my autocracy."

At best, it's a complete reversal of Hanlon's razor, where witches and commies and whatnot are hiding behind every corner.

The term deep state has been around for a long time. It is the group of non-elected people who exert considerable influence from behind the scenes, and that remain from administration to administration. But whatever you want to call it, it is exactly the deep state that facilitates things like yesterday's $350B arms deal with Saudi Arabia.

The absence of a deep state would be much scarier than the alternative!

Maybe scarier for you and all the running dogs of US imperialism. The people of countries under semi-colonial and semi-feudal rule may disagree.

On what basis did you assume I was a supporter of US imperialism?

Besides, as far as feudal masters go, the US is despite their colorful history on the more benign end of the cruelty spectrum, which is really saying something about the competition.

Ultimately the regions subjected to American rule would see their conditions deteriorate further if the deep state didn't soften the brutal seesaw motion that inevitably follows the change in leadership.

You went straight from saying, “Don't assume I'm a running dog!” to literally proving that you are a running dog! So cool.

In that case... Woof bark!

please chill out dude

I find myself having mixed feelings. Generally, I like the idea that there are people who have many years of experience in various positions at all levels of government. In that way the deep state is wonderful. It would be insanity if everyone at all levels got swapped out every 4 years. At the same time it's the deep state who is responsible for the NSA wire-tapping. It's the deep state who began planning our invasion of Syria in 2006 with Israel and Saudi Arabia, long before the Arab Spring or chemical weapons.

So in some sense I think the deep state could use a bit of a shake-up to hopefully get it back in line with what I believe are American values. At the same time I'm afraid of the short term consequences of this shake-up.

All those trillions of dollars that would need to be spent bettering society instead of .. being spent secretly on who knows what ..

The deep state unraveling has nothing to do with Trump whatsoever and dates back at least as far as the Snowden leaks and cablegate. Well, I guess it does have a little bit to do with Trump since some of the ways it's unraveling include leaks that seem to be intended to harm Trump but so far have proven to lack substance.

Trump is doing arms deals with Saudi Arabia for the military industry, a part of the deep state, as we speak.

> The most likely source, a leak inside. A leak they were never truly able to detect.

This is pure conjecture.

It is quite easy to do data mining on your subjects if you aren't actually bound by laws, evidence, or human rights.

The drug lords were using AS/400 mainframes decades ago to ferret out traitors. Sure, they killed a few people who weren't, but, meh, who cares, right? I can't imagine the Chinese government actually cares to any greater degree.

Unless an informant doesn't actually want any tangible benefit, there is going to be SOME trail in the electronic ether nowadays. Even the act of disabling your phone is going to be a trail nowadays.

If you simply kill off anybody who falls afoul of your "standard profile" you're going to get your intelligence agents.

If I was in this game I'd be quite careful about that kind of behaviour, and I'd also be gleefully delighted to get an inkling that my opponent had adopted this strategy.

Why? Because I would assume that my opponent was planting evidence to slander my people, and if I thought that they would act on hints and slanders well - I'd have a fun program of hinting and slandering the keystones of their operations (especially counter intel) as well as I could identify them.

The dominant game here is to trust your operation. The way that you win is to build as capable a trust system as you can thus enabling you to run as large an operation as possible. This is why terrorist networks operate in atoms, they are short duration by definition because they tip their hands with any action so there is no deep network building.

At work I often struggle to understand the motivations of some of my less benevolent colleagues, and this gets me into difficulty from time to time. But, the thing about the Chinese shooting the fella in the office carpark, to me, it doesn't sound like an act that is likely to forge deep bonds in the team.

>The drug lords were using AS/400 mainframes decades ago to ferret out traitors.

do you have any reading on this?

2002 article date--arrests were 8 years earlier: http://cocaine.org/cokecrime/

>It doesn't take a side, it doesn't try to fire you up, it just informs.

By informing, they do take a side. It's just that now you like the side they've taken. I'm not saying that all Trump articles are completely justified - the media feeds on hyperbole and fear after all, but a large number of articles are simply trying to inform when talking about Trump.

Here's the first link I saw today on NYT page (not the biggest one, but one on the top of "Sunday Review" column):

4-Year-Olds Don’t Act Like Donald Trump By ALISON GOPNIK Comparing our president to a child is inaccurate and unfair to children.

What is it informing me about? That Trump is not literally 4 years old? Well, thanks a lot. In fact, the whole article is dedicated to describing how Trump sucks so much that comparing anybody to him is an insult. Yeah thanks for "informing" me, I'd never know it if not for NYT reporting.

First problem is that you've mistaken an opinion piece for reporting.

As the other poster mentioned... You did notice the article is an opinion piece? It says 'opinion' right at the very top in prominent type.

For myself, I wouldn't read the WSJ expecting to agree with all of their opinion pieces, though it does happen.

Every article need an angle or a hook to become a story, and that's OK since they sell ads, just like everyone else these days.

It's only when they go hyperbolic, and exclaim themselves as the last stand against the Dark Lord that it's a bit tiresome.

You must not read the NYT much. I just took a glance at their homepage and less than 1/3 of the articles are on US politics. The vast majority of their articles I see on HN have a wide variety of interesting topics -

> They Could Buy, but Why? Meet the High-Renters

> Google, Not the Government, Is Building the Future

> Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars

> Noncompete Clauses: Signing Away the Right to Get a New Job

> How Harvard Business School Has Reshaped American Capitalism

> China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order

> Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps

Honestly, I really don't understand how anyone, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, can wholesale dismiss the NYT. They do good reporting, solid analysis, and if you don't like their editorial board (just as I have little liking for the WSJ editorial board) - don't read them. This tendency to stick with a limited set a source(s) you agree with is at the core dysfunction of the US government today, imo.

> This tendency to stick with a limited set a source(s) you agree with is at the core dysfunction of the US government today, imo.

If you believe this, you should definitely not read much of any single source. Including the NYT. Unless you have time to read much of many sources, which makes it full-time job.

Though I'd agree with you that if you skip reporting on current US politics, part of the world politics (e.g. all Middle East reporting) and any editorial content on left's causes du jour, NYT may be not that bad.

"This story is incredible - it shows a massive failure" - I don't see how it is 'incredible' - the history of CIA is a 'Legacy of Ashes' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_of_Ashes_%28book%29

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