The other two notable vulnerabilities are how and where foreign spies are recruited and what they use to communicate. How would you recruit a Chinese official or scientist who would have information that Washington wanted? You would approach him when he is outside China on business, vacation, or studying. But the problem is that those places where American intelligence can operate freely are relatively easily identifiable and are also well known to the counterintelligence service in Beijing. So a Chinese physicist recruited by U.S. intelligence while doing postgraduate studies at an American university would intensify interest in others who also attended that university, some of whom might also be spies.
Back in my time in the Agency, a number of hostile intelligence services identified vacation and business destinations in the Middle East where their officials were being spotted by CIA, approached, and sometimes recruited. Knowing this, they could focus on recent travelers to those areas and were able to turn several of the agents while also identifying a number of others. The Chinese counterintelligence service could certainly have done the same in assessing its travelers that it considered sensitive from either a political or occupational point of view.
Knowing how the opponent is approaching and recruiting spies from among your countrymen also provides an opportunity to run a dangle operation, which can be used to enter, identify, and disrupt an intelligence network. A dangle is essentially a double agent who will pretend to work for the Americans while really working for his own country. U.S. intelligence polygraphs new agents but “swirl” examiners confess that lie detectors work best on Americans, who find it hard to lie when confronted by a machine that they believe can tell what is the truth. Asians and Arabs are regarded as particularly difficult to examine effectively because their cultures make it possible to mentally compartmentalize their responses. Guilt-ridden Catholics are easy.
And then there are the communications, seen by many as the most vulnerable element in agent handling. No one writes letters anymore, so secret or invisible writing is passé, but electronic communication using satellites is very much in. Messages from spies are encrypted, but anything encrypted can be unencrypted if enough time and effort are committed to the project. One should assume that the counterintelligence services in Moscow and Beijing are very good at what they do and quite willing to work hard. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-china-rolled-up-a-cia-network/
comment to above article:
Offshoring for profit means much of the code and the electronics is made in China. The CIA etc insist that Apple include vulnerabilities, and I have read that China adds an extra spy chip to every phone. Another American company offshored writing secure/military code to Russia. Russian and Chinese coders don’t cost as much.
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5-22-17 This would indicate an internal, insider threat type of person who was spying for the Chinese,” former CIA Deputy General Counsel for Operations Robert Eatinger told Fox News. Eatinger was Acting General Counsel of the CIA from 2009 to 2014 and now runs his own law firm, SpyLaw Consulting.
Former CIA clandestine officer Mike Baker agreed. “When you start losing a number of assets, especially when they are all compartmentalized away from each other, you have to assume that one possible explanation is you’ve got a counterintelligence problem, that there is someone with knowledge on the inside - a mole…a traitor,” Baker said.
Asked whether the incident represents an ongoing vulnerability to Chinese infiltration of the CIA, Eatinger pointed out “if somebody is very smart and cautious they can get away with this for a very long time.” The CIA declined to comment on the disappearing CIA informants in China....
Intelligence gathering “is a high risk world,” Baker told Fox News. “That’s why it’s such an emotional issue for the agency. People die. It’s very serious. It’s never helpful if people can’t keep their mouths shut.” http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/05/22/china-boasts-after-news-report-it-executed-cia-informants.html
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Kevin Mallory, 60, of Leesburg was arrested Thursday and made an initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. The self-employed consultant who speaks Chinese is charged under the federal Espionage Act and could face life in prison. In fact, if certain conditions are met, the charges could make Mallory eligible for the death penalty, prosecutor John Gibbs said at Mallory's initial appearance.
Court records indicate that Mallory was an Army veteran and worked as a special agent for the Diplomatic Security Service at the U.S. State Department from 1987 to 1990. Since 1990, he has worked for a variety of government agencies and defense contractors, according to the affidavit. He held Top Secret security clearance.
According to the affidavit, Mallory traveled to Shanghai in April, and was interviewed by Customs agents at O'Hare Airport in Chicago after he failed to declare $16,500 in cash found in two carry-on bags. The FBI interviewed him the next month, and he admitted that he met with two people from a Chinese think tank that he now suspected were Chinese intelligence agents. He said they had given him a special communications device for transmitting documents.
According to the affidavit, Mallory told the FBI agents that the only documents he transferred were two unclassified "white papers" he had written on U.S. policy matters. But FBI agents searched the device and found other documents and messages that Mallory thought had been deleted, according to the affidavit. In one message, Mallory wrote to the suspected Chinese agent, "your object is to gain information, and my object is to be paid." The agent responded, "my current object is to make sure your security and to try to reimburse you."
An analysis of the documents on the device found four classified documents, including three with a Top Secret classification. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/06/22/virginia-man-charged-with-giving-secret-documents-to-china.html
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Mallory’s home in Leesburg, VA gets surrounded by agents. Records show he paid $1,156,000 for the home in 2005.
http://www.raysemko.com/2017/06/22/defense-contractor-kevin-mallory-arrested-spying-china/
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