The Atlantic

The Specter of a Chinese Mole in America

The case of a suspected turncoat couldn’t come at a worse time for the intelligence community.
Source: Damir Sagolj / Reuters

The arrest of former CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee sheds light on a shadowy counterintelligence drama that has been playing out for nearly eight years. Starting around 2010, the Central Intelligence Agency saw some of its most valuable spies inside China go down. And I don’t mean “going down” in a perp-walk-to-the-courthouse sort of way. This is China: They were executed. One was , 18 to 20 CIA sources , making it one of the most damaging counterintelligence losses in agency history.

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