The Chinese authorities managed to find about two dozen CIA agents in the government and neutralize them - to kill or imprison them, the newspaper The New York Times reported citing sources in the US intelligence community. In particular, it is claimed that from the end of 2010 to the end of 2012, the Chinese killed at least a dozen CIA informers, one of whom was shot in the courtyard of the government building - as a signal to others, what threatens to work for American intelligence. In total, according to the intelligence community, the Chinese identified 18-20 agents. According to the interlocutors of the publication, the CIA initially succeeded in recruiting a number of officials "in the depths of the Beijing bureaucracy" - mostly those who were disappointed by the "corruption" of the government. Until 2010, the intelligence network regularly supplied US intelligence with the necessary information about the internal activities of the Chinese government, but then its flow began to dry out. This problem was considered quite serious, and the CIA and the FBI began an investigation to establish the cause of what happened. Almost every employee of the US Embassy in China was inspected, regardless of rank. Some experts who conducted the investigation assumed that the Chinese cracked the encrypted channel of data exchange between the agents and the center, others suspected that the "Chinese" division of the CIA had a traitor working for Beijing. Under special suspicion, one of the former specialists, who had access to information about the agents, got a US citizen, an ethnic Chinese who left the CIA shortly before the series of failures and settled in one of the Asian countries with his family. There he took up business, and as his former colleagues suspected, the PRC provided him with appropriate opportunities. The former employee was interrogated in the US - he rejected all suspicions and argued that he had reasons to live in a new place, and then returned to Asia. A sufficient number of evidence against him to collect and failed.

The loss of these Chinese agents in the CIA is estimated as one of the most difficult in recent decades. In April, the Beijing Office of the Ministry of State Security of the PRC announced the payment of cash bonuses to citizens who provided information on foreign spies. For this kind of data, the informer can receive from 10 to 500 thousand yuan (from 1.5 to 72 thousand dollars), depending on the value of the information provided.

Original article: NYT learned about neutralizing the network of Chinese officials recruited by the CIA.