(Ken Silva, Headline USA) CIA Director William Burns reportedly said last week that his agency is rebuilding its network of spies in China, which were compromised for more than a decade, likely due to a Chinese mole embedded within the FBI.
“We’ve made progress, and we’re working very hard over recent years to ensure that we have strong human intelligence capability to complement what we can acquire through other methods,” Burns reportedly told the Aspen Security Forum.
Burns’s speech prompted a response from Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning, who called the spy chief’s comment “concerning.”
“The U.S. on the one hand keeps spreading disinformation on so-called ‘Chinese spying and cyber attacks,’ and on the other hand tells the public about its large-scale intelligence activities targeting China,” She reportedly said, adding that China will “take all measures necessary to safeguard national security.”
In 2018, Foreign Policy reported that the number of CIA assets caught in China was around 30 since 2010—attributing the problem to “botched CIA communications.”
But more recently, a new book from veteran national security reporter James Bamford suggests that a Chinese mole within the FBI contributed to the CIA assets being compromised.
Bamford’s book, Spyfail: Foreign Spies, Moles, Saboteurs, and the Collapse of America’s Counterintelligence, details the story of former CIA officer who became an FBI translator in 2004.
“Over at least the next six years and possibly much longer, he took over the role of FBI mole,” Bamford wrote of the FBI mole, Alexander Yuk Ching Ma.
“Ma had extensive knowledge of the CIA’s highly secret covcom techniques by which CIA officers communicated with their sources. Every few months, once he had accumulated a load of secrets, he would call his handlers,” Bamford added.
“They would then book him a hotel room in Shanghai, pick him up at the airport, and take him into town, where he would hand over his secrets and be debriefed by agents of the Shanghai State Security Bureau.”
Ma was arrested in August 2020, and his criminal case is ongoing in Hawaii—with many of the records remaining under seal.
Neither the CIA nor the FBI has publicly spoken about the role Ma may have played in compromising spies in China.
Ken Silva is a staff writer at Headline USA. Follow him at twitter.com/jd_cashless.
