I'm drawn to them. They really reveal the backstory of major events and real motivations of history.
China ain't playing games.
FBI arrests fmr CIA officer & Chinese MOLE Jerry Chun Shing Lee; 20+ CIA Agents Killed/Caught
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China ain't playing games.
Solving the CIA’s Mass Murder Mystery
By John R. Schindler • 01/18/18 11:30am
Opinion
The wisdom of using Chinese immigrants to spy on their native land seems unwise. TEH ENG KOON/AFP/Getty Images
In recent years I’ve criticized the National Security Agency, my former employer, for mismanagement and repeated failures. I’ve taken NSA to task for flawed leadership leading to low morale, and above all a habitual ignoring of counterintelligence that has led to numerous high-profile scandalssince the agency IT contractor Edward Snowden defected to Moscow in mid-2013 with a trove of a million-plus classified documents.
Now that the mainstream media has finally noticed that NSA is in crisis, Admiral Mike Rogers, agency director since 2014, has announced he’s retiring soon. However, it should be noted that what ails NSA exists across our Intelligence Community to varying degrees, and its persistent shortcomings in counterintelligence are not unique.
Things don’t look much better at Langley, and CIA’s mistakes in the counterspy game have gotten quite a few people killed over the last decade. At the end of December 2009, at Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan, a suicide bomber blew up himself and nine others: seven CIA personnel (five agency officers and two contractors) and a partner each from Jordan and Afghanistan. This was Langley’s bloodiest day in decades as well as a needless debacle. American spies were fooled by a “golden source” whom they were meeting for the first time in person: a top Al-Qa’ida operative who really was setting them up for death. This was a basic failure of counterintelligence vetting bolstered by wishful thinking.
And it was hardly an isolated incident. Back in 2011, at least a dozen Lebanese agents who were clandestinely working for the CIA, reporting on Hizballah activities, were detected and apparently killed when sloppy tradecraft led to their unmasking. Their CIA handlers employed amateurish methods—in one case texting an agent the word “PIZZA” to set up a secret meeting at a Beirut Pizza Hut—and got their helpers killed. Similarly, two decades before that, several dozen CIA agents inside Iran were identified and presumably killed when compromised communications methods by Langley led to their capture.
However, the most serious such setback in recent years occurred in China, where in 2010 the CIA’s secret agents began disappearing, never to be heard from again. As many as 20 Chinese nationals who were on the Langley payroll went silent over a two-year period; they were jailed and, in at least a dozen cases, killed. Like Tehran, Beijing has no qualms about shooting traitors. One of the unmasked spies was shot in front of colleagues, in a government courtyard, to send a message about the consequences of collaborating with American intelligence.
Such a vast compromise was an indelible sign that something had gone seriously wrong inside the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Practically the agency’s whole clandestine network inside China was systematically dismantled by Beijing’s counterspies, with lethal consequences. To any counterintelligence veteran, this meant one of two things: Langley had a well-placed Chinese mole or the CIA’s secret communications had been compromised.
This all looked eerily like the major-league mid-1980s disaster, when more than a dozen Soviets who were spying for the CIA—many of them senior intelligence officials—were arrested and, in most cases, executed. Virtually the whole stable of CIA’s agents in Moscow was taken out in a a few months, an unmissable sign that something had gone badly wrong. Debate raged over exactly what happened, and it took nine years for counterspies to identify CIA officer Aldrich Ames as a turncoat and the culprit in most (though not all) of those losses.
By 2012, when it became obvious that something similar had happened in China, a joint CIA-FBI investigation commenced and quickly got bogged down in the usual bureaucratic rivalries plus the lack of hard evidence. Codenamed HONEY BADGER, the top-secret inquiry repeated many of the patterns that plagued what became the Ames investigation. Now, as then, CIA officials were sheepish about contemplating the possibility of a mole at Langley—something that FBI agents considered plausible—and much attention focused on possible communications compromises. Sometimes sloppy tradecraft by CIA officers in handling their Chinese sources was looked at—but could it explain the loss of 20 agents, a whole spy network?
Now, we may be getting some answers, at last, with the announcement this week by the Department of Justice that it made an espionage arrest on Monday night. Arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York was 53-year-old Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA officer, who had been a focus of counterintelligence investigation for years. Born Zhen Cheng Li, he emigrated to the United States with his family, served two years in the U.S. Army, and joined the CIA in 1994, working as a case officer until he resigned in 2007. Lee believed his career had stalled, and he left the agency disgruntled—which is always a potential warning sign to counterintelligence investigators.
Upon examining Lee’s career and what he had access to while working in CIA espionage operations, he looked like a good fit for a possible mole. However, his departure from the agency and subsequent move to Hong Kong (where, investigators believed, his new job had been arranged by Chinese intelligence) complicated matters. He was therefore lured back to the United States in mid-August 2012 for meetings in Honolulu, ostensibly for possible work on a CIA contract, and while Lee was busy, FBI agents, armed with a search warrant, took apart his hotel room.
What they found is spelled out in the DoJ affidavit: “two small books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.”
Possessing such information is a serious crime as a well a violation of the non-disclosure agreements that Lee signed when he joined the CIA. Moreover, it’s difficult to conjure up a benign explanation of why a former agency case officer took such sensitive and highly classified information home with him—and then traveled around the world with it in tow. FBI agents questioned Lee about his foreign contacts during his Hawaii visit, but during a total of five interviews while Lee was in the United States, they did not interrogate him about his “two small books.” Lee eventually returned to Hong Kong, a free man.
Investigators in Washington observed that the roll-up of the CIA’s agents in China halted after Lee’s trip to Hawaii, and although he remained the prime suspect behind Langley’s counterintelligence debacle, he remained out of reach in Beijing-controlled Hong Kong. His appearance in New York this week made him accessible to the FBI, which placed him in custody, apparently after attempting to get him to talk about his secret activities.
It should be noted that Lee has been charged with “unlawful retention of national defense information,” which can lead to 10 years in federal prison, but DoJ has made no mention of any connection to the 2010-12 spy disasters. Neither is there any indication so far that Lee will face charges relating to the deaths of CIA agents in China, notwithstanding that he’s still the top suspect in that investigation.
This wouldn’t be the first time that the FBI has arrested a turncoat on lesser charges in the hopes of coercing a confession to more serious crimes. However, if Lee doesn’t talk, prosecutors may be facing serious obstacles, particularly because the Intelligence Community never likes to see its secrets discussed in open court—especially when what’s revealed is unflattering.
This is a high-profile case that illustrates many of the IC’s persistent counterintelligence problems. In particular, the wisdom of using Chinese immigrants to spy on their native land seems unwise, given Beijing’s habit of ruthlessly exploiting Overseas Chinese for espionage. We can expect calls of “racial profiling” to appear soon, even though the only racial profiling here is done by Chinese intelligence by recruiting their co-nationals abroad for espionage against their adopted countries. Above all, if Jerry Lee is a traitor who got several CIA agents killed, he needs to face justice for that crime.
John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer. Read his full bio here.
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I'm pretty sure if they were officers or American spies they would've given him the max.
Recca Gatsby
LWO
They're everywhere. Especially places you wouldn't expect. They have different tasks and occupy many fields of profession. Odds are you have encountered at least one.
This dude gave up the whole Asia spy net work 
Alleged CIA China turncoat Lee may have compromised U.S. spies in Russia too
by Tom Winter, Ken Dilanian and Jonathan DienstJan 19 2018, 9:08 pm ET
The arrest last week of a former CIA officer suspected of spying for China exposed one of the most significant intelligence breaches in American history. But the damage is even worse than first reported, sources familiar with the matter tell NBC News.
A secret FBI–CIA task force investigating the case concluded that the Chinese government penetrated the CIA's method of clandestine communication with its spies, using that knowledge to arrest and execute at least 20 CIA informants, according to multiple current and former government officials.
American officials suspect China then shared that information with Russia, which employed it to expose, arrest and possibly even kill American spies in that country, said the current and former officials, who declined to be named discussing a highly sensitive matter. The possible sharing with Russia has not previously been reported.
Those sobering findings, sometime after the inquiry began in 2012, led the CIA to temporarily shut down human spying in China, and to overhaul the way it communicates with its assets around the world, according to former government officials familiar with the case.
It was a shocking blow to an American spy agency that prides itself on its field operations. There was also a devastating human cost: Some 20 CIA sources were executed by the Chinese government, two former officials said — a higher number of dead than initially reported by NBC News and the New York Times. Then an unknown number of Russian assets also disappeared, sources say.
Eventually a top secret joint FBI-CIA task force investigation led authorities to suspect that former CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee had been spying for China. Lee, 53, was arrested this week and charged, not with espionage, but with a single count of possessing classified information.
U.S. officials told NBC News they don't believe Lee ever will be charged as a spy, in part because they don't have all the proof they might need, and in part because they would not want to air the evidence they do have in a public courtroom.
FBI agents began to suspect Lee after they received a tip that he had passed information to Chinese intelligence officers while working for a Japanese tobacco company in Hong Kong, sources said, a detail first reported Thursday by the New York Times. They also found it suspicious when Lee took a job at an auction house in Hong Kong that was co-owned by a senior Communist Party official, sources said. He eventually ended up working for Christie's, the international auction house.
When agents searched Lee's hotel rooms in 2012, they found notebooks with the names of covert CIA sources, according to court documents.
But not all of the agent arrests and deaths could be linked to information possessed by Lee, who left the CIA in 2007, the former officials said.
A man (right, wearing blue tie) identified by local Hong Kong media as former CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee stands in front of a member of security at the unveiling of Leonardo da Vinci's 'Salvator Mundi' painting at the Christie's showroom in Hong Kong on on Oct. 13, 2017. Anthony Wallace / AFP - Getty Images file
"No single officer had access to all of them," one official said.
Investigators soon began to conclude that its communications system for covert communications, referred to as "covcom," had been infiltrated. One theory is that Lee may have helped the Chinese do that. But two former officials said the CIA's system for exchanging messages with its agents was shockingly primitive and subject to easy penetration by the Chinese.
"All they had to do was get one agent's laptop, and they could figure it out," one former official said.
Soon after the task force concluded the Chinese had penetrated covcom, it got an even more troubling report: That after a joint training session between Chinese and Russian intelligence officers, the Russians "came back saying we got good info on covcom," as the former official put it.
Investigators began examining cases of U.S. assets in Russia who had disappeared. Officials concluded they had to change their system for agent communications.
Eventually, Mark Kelton, the CIA's top counterintelligence official, had to brief the leaders of the House and Senate intelligence committees on the damage, some of whom vented their fury behind closed doors. But few others were aware of it, even within the confines of the CIA and FBI. The New York Times reported on the case last year, including the detail that authorities suspected a former CIA officer living in an Asian country.
Last week, for reasons that still are not clear, Lee flew from Hong Kong to New York, where he was met by an FBI team.
The CIA declined to comment, as did Kelton, who was the top counterintelligence official at time.
Ed O'Callaghan, a senior prosecutor in the Justice Department's National Security Division, called Lee's capture "a very important arrest." During an unrelated appearance at the White House earlier this week, he said that although Lee was charged with illegally retaining classified information, "As that case proceeds through the courts, I would expect that more information about the conduct that underlies those charges and the complaint will come out."
Lee appeared briefly in a Brooklyn federal courtroom Monday after his arrest at JFK airport. As early as next week, he will be brought to a courtroom in Alexandria, Virginia, where he will be formally prosecuted, officials said.
Lee's attorney declined to comment.
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LeetStickMcGee
Pro
We're going to see more backlash as China becomes more economically powerful.
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