The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is struggling to rebuild its damaged spy network in China, unnamed American officials have told the Wall Street Journal (WSJ).
According to them, the goal is to restore the CIA’s "human espionage capabilities" in the People's Republic of China (PRC), where the agency lost its network of agents a decade ago.
The sources referred to what they described as Beijing’s spycatchers, who "all but blinded" CIA agents in China at the time, when the officials claimed at least "two dozen assets" providing information to the US had been executed or put behind bars.
The officials argued that the US currently faces limited understanding of secret plans by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his associates on key security issues, including those pertaining to Taiwan.
"We have no real insight into [Chinese] leadership plans and intentions in China at all," the sources claimed.
The insiders added that details of what went wrong are not known to the public and it is unclear whether any of the CIA’s employees have been held accountable. One official argued that the agency’s losses in China were "horrendous."
Per the sources, the CIA and other US spy agencies cut spending on counterterrorism and other targets to focus on funding programs to penetrate the Chinese government after 2020.
One official made it clear that strengthening the human spy network targeted on China will be a tricky task, saying, "The reality is that you don’t have collection resources that you can exploit all over the world."
The claims come after CIA Director William Burns said in an interview with the WSJ that China remains at the top of the agency’s to-do list.
“We are approaching the PRC as a global priority, more than doubling the budget resources devoted to the China mission over the past three years, and establishing the China Mission Center as CIA’s only single country mission center to coordinate the full agency’s efforts on this issue. Even as we are balancing multiple priorities including ongoing conflicts, we remain intensely engaged on the strategic long-term challenge posed by the PRC,” he said.
House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Turne, for his part, was not that optimistic, bemoaning the fact that China’s "goals and objectives are so vast that it really is very difficult to say that we’re doing a great job."
The two spoke as the Chinese Ministry of State Security continue to tighten screws on individuals suspected of providing information to the CIA in exchange for money. Additionally, Beijing passed a new counter-espionage law that came into effect last year, a document that expands the list of activities that could be considered spying.