China Kills US Intel Assets In 2010; NYT Ignores The Obvious Question About Hillary

Although the New York Times has lots of guesses about how China identified CIA assets, it ignores the role Hillary’s server may have played.

Sherlock Holmes China kills assets Hillary's RoleIn a move that crippled US intel, China, between 2010 and 2012, somehow became aware of the identities of people cooperating with the CIA in China.  And yet, the NYT seems to be deliberately ignoring the 800 lbs gorilla in the room as it reports on this intelligence disaster.

This from the NYT:

The Chinese government systematically dismantled C.I.A. spying operations in the country starting in 2010, killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

Current and former American officials described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades. It set off a scramble in Washington’s intelligence and law enforcement agencies to contain the fallout, but investigators were bitterly divided over the cause. Some were convinced that a mole within the C.I.A. had betrayed the United States. Others believed that the Chinese had hacked the covert system the C.I.A. used to communicate with its foreign sources. Years later, that debate remains unresolved.

But there was no disagreement about the damage. From the final weeks of 2010 through the end of 2012, according to former American officials, the Chinese killed at least a dozen of the C.I.A.’s sources. . . .

Still others were put in jail. All told, the Chinese killed or imprisoned 18 to 20 of the C.I.A.’s sources in China, according to two former senior American officials, effectively unraveling a network that had taken years to build.

Assessing the fallout from an exposed spy operation can be difficult, but the episode was considered particularly damaging. The number of American assets lost in China, officials said, rivaled those lost in the Soviet Union and Russia during the betrayals of both Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I., who divulged intelligence operations to Moscow for years. . . .

By 2013, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. concluded that China’s success in identifying C.I.A. agents had been blunted — it is not clear how — but the damage had been done.

2010 to 2012 were the final two years of Hillary’s four year term as Sec. of State.  Throughout that period, she was involved in diplomacy with China and surrounding countries on numerous occasions.  Her daily access to our nation’s secrets ended by 2013.

It wasn’t until 2016 that we learned that Hillary had used a private email server to conduct all of her business as Sec. of State.  We know that she placed on her private server, or otherwise discussed in email chains appearing on her private server, thousands of bits of information classified Secret, and at least fourteen bits which were classified Top Secret by our intelligence agencies.  Did any relate to China, and if so, could Chinese intelligence have used that information to identify our intel assets?

Moreover, we know for certain at least one of Hillary’s email chains outright contained the identities of some highly placed intel assets.  We do not know if this was associated with China.  And lastly, we know that the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, refused in 2016 to conduct a damage assessment of the likely hacked information on Hillary’s private server, even though such an assessment was required by law.

Bottom line, given the timing of this Chinese intelligence coup coincident with Hillary’s use of a private server to store our nation’s secrets, it seems that one of the very first questions a barely competent investigative reporter should be asking is whether any of the information Hillary placed on her private server could have been a source of China’s counterintelligence?  Amazingly enough, the NYT makes no mention of Hillary in its article.  Go figure.