Mole hunt! Mole hunt!
That’s the cry over at the CIA, and it’s exciting! See, here’s the deal. Back in the day, it seems that the Chinese were picking off our “key informants” (aka, “spies”), and no one knew how or why. Thanks, however, to bungled “tradecraft” on the part of the Chinese, the good guys (that’s us) were able to clear a wrongly suspected CIA agent and identify the correct one, the dirty mole, who’s now behind bars, where he belongs. It’s just like in the movies!
That’s how WashPost columnist David Ignatius tells the story in a pulse-pounding piece “The saga of the Chinese mole reads like a spy thriller”, complete with a massive picture of M. Mole, aka Jerry Chun Shing Lee.
Well, that’s what you are supposed to think. The thing is, Lee is in jail, pleading guilty to the charge of conspiring to gather and send secret information to the Chinese, earning himself 15 years in the big house. But wait! Lee only pleaded guilty to “conspiring to gather and send secret information”. He didn’t say he actually sent any, much less information allowing the Chinese to identify, and ultimately execute, at least 20 U.S. spies in China. So how does Dave know that Lee was the one who enabled the Chinese to identify the U.S. agents? Because his CIA buddies told him so—entirely off the record of course, this is all very hush hush, goddamn national security for Christ’s sake, so just believe what we tell you without asking so many damnfool questions! Just believe what Dave says!
But not everyone is so trusting as Dave. Tom Winter, Ken Dilanian and Jonathan Dienst, writing online for NBC News, have a bit of a different take: ”Alleged CIA China turncoat Lee may have compromised U.S. spies in Russia too”. Here’s how they tell it.
Investigators [for the CIA] 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.
So is it possible that Lee wasn’t a mole after all? That it was all the CIA’s bungling that got 20 of its agents killed? And may have gotten some of its Russian agents compromised as well? Guess Dave doesn’t want you to know about that part.
Afterwords
This piece is largely a rewrite of an earlier piece I published, “Dirty Chinese try to prevent the U.S. from spying on them”. What happened was that I first read Dave’s piece and later thought to write something about Lee, forgetting that I had gotten the story from Dave. I searched online for stories about Chinese spies and ended up getting information from the New York Times, the Guardian, and NBC News (links in the original piece). It wasn’t until after I finished that I stumbled across the column by Dave that I had read in the first place. I then added an “Update” tossing a little shade in Dave’s direction. But after I thought about it I decided that Dave’s perfidy needed a blog entry/takedown of its very own, particularly for his failure to include even the possibility, found in both the Times and NBC piece, that Lee was not a mole and it was the CIA’s own incompetence that cost the lives of 20 agents. And I will fault the Post as well for publishing such a one-sided piece, particularly since there was plenty of information out in the mainstream press to contradict Dave’s “spy thriller”.
