From my readings of CIA memoirs and spy novels, CIA Agents (aka sources or informants) are really foreign people reporting information to the CIA Officers which are US Government employees.
If these were US government workers reporting secrets to the Chinese I would expect imprisonment, etc. I guess it isn't too shocking they would do the same, albeit more cruelly, to their own traitors.
There was a post recently about how easy it was for foreign governments, in the 1970's, to track the actual CIA Officers on station at an embassy. TL;DR: Reading job titles and observing who they hung out with was one way. Also mentioned was that CIA officers rarely intermingled with actual Diplomats and support staff often knew who was who because of secret areas of the embassy that were off limits.
The article mentions a potential hack into the systems but it could have been good old spy-craft by following people and noticing patterns to find the sources.
> The article mentions a potential hack into the systems but it could have been good old spy-craft by following people and noticing patterns to find the sources.
I suspect that is the case, too. Especially this:
> Some officers met their sources at a restaurant where Chinese agents had planted listening devices, former officials said, and even the waiters worked for Chinese intelligence.
I sometimes go to some fancy and downtown restaurants in the Eastern European capital where I live, and you very often can see politicians there and people you very often see on TV as having had problems with the law. I often joke with one of my work-colleagues about how most probably all the restaurant tables in those kind of places are wired. It doesn't help that the most fancy party place in the city is partially owned by the daughter of a the director of the Security Services back in the 1990s. All these places are also filled with foreign businessmen and I suspect there are also people working for foreign embassies.
While I used to live and eat out in the poorer parts of the city I never, never saw what looked to be foreign persons eating at those restaurants. They are all gravitating around the same area in downtown city. I suspect a very similar thing is happening in China and in other countries' capitals around the world. Most of the Western diplomats who are also carrying intelligence activity on the side don't seem very capable of just blending in in a foreign environment.
> I sometimes go to some fancy and downtown restaurants in the Eastern European capital where I live, and you very often can see politicians there and people you very often see on TV as having had problems with the law. I often joke with one of my work-colleagues about how most probably all the restaurant tables in those kind of places are wired.
Lol, you don't know how close to truth you are. It has actually happened already in Poland in 2014 - a high-end restaurant in Warsaw, where ruling party's politicians liked to hang out, was wired and the recording subsequently leaked to the press. It was one of the factors that led to this party falling out of favor with voters and the "right-wing" opposition taking over.
Club Loft and Anca Magureanu, the daughter of former SRI director Virgil Magureanu. I'm on mobile and am too lazy to link here, but the info is easily searchable.
> From my readings of CIA memoirs and spy novels, CIA Agents (aka sources or informants) are really foreign people reporting information to the CIA Officers which are US Government employees
Yep. If you haven't read it, the Billion Dollar Spy details the efforts the CIA made in Moscow during the Cold War. Pretty good read.
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I really don't get the US hating all Asians part. Where does that come from?
Many of the cold war era wars were proxy wars with Russia to stop the spread of communism. A natural place for that to occur was where Russia was attempting to move neighboring governments to communism, which was Asia.
Also we were at war with Japan, they attacked the US after all, so I would hardly call them allies at that point in history.
> a horrific subset of people of whatever sort doing things like raping and killing at Nanking
We seem to have forgiven Germans for the holocaust. I don't detect any particular "Germans are less humane than us" sentiment in the U.S. these days.
> torturing and eating dogs, cats, monkeys, which just is entirely sacriligious everywhere else
We torture and eat pigs in the U.S., who are just as intelligent as dogs. I think you have the causality arrow wrong. We latch on to a few people in Asia eating dogs because we already decided they're lesser than and we're looking for an excuse.
> A few bad apples really do spoil the whole bunch, and that's reality.
I think it's much more complicated than that. Why do bad apples spoil feminism for example, but bad apples don't spoil the NFL?
> Every single time that the United States has engaged in conflict with Asian countries, it has waged not war but programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination.
No. There were no US Einsatzgruppen, there was no US equivalent to the nazi Backe-Plan.
The US occupation of Japan was remarkably benign, for a country concerned with "systematic and indiscriminate extermination". You may wish to contrast this with, say, the behaviour of the Japanese Imperial Army within the Asian-Co-Prosperity sphere, which, while not really engaged in genocide, had a habit of large-scale massacres, gang rape, torture and enslaving the local Asian population which they considered as inferior, for all the propaganda about freeing Asia from the white man's rule.
If you really want to see what a blueprint for genocide looks like, I invite you to read about the Nazi Hunger plan [1]. Nothing the US did was even remotely like this.
>No. There were no US Einsatzgruppen, there was no US equivalent to the nazi Backe-Plan.
Why bother when you can just drop some atomic bombs to test on them (to "make them surrender")? Or spray them with agent orange? Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?
>The US occupation of Japan was remarkably benign, for a country concerned with "systematic and indiscriminate extermination"
Or course it was. As was their post-war dealings of West Germany. It helps that there was a large competitor eyeing both regions, so they had to make friends quickly...
> Why bother when you can just drop some atomic bombs to test on them (to "make them surrender")?
Why the scare quotes? It is still debated, and the fanaticism of the Japanese resistance (for instance, in Okinawa) makes a fairly compelling case that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population.
> Or spray them with agent orange?
It's pretty terrible as a weapon of mass destruction. Don't you think that if the US had wanted to annihilate the population of North Vietnam, they would have employed something a bit more direct?
Comparatively, I don't see the general disregard for civilian casualties exhibited by the Saudis in their ongoing bombing campaign in Yemen as a sign that they intend to wipe out the population wholesale.
> Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?
Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not condoning the US foreign policy. But I don't see the US involvement in the mass killings conducted by Suharto as something racially motivated against Asians. It was a case of "the only good communist/leftist sympathizer is a dead one".
> Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely not condoning the US foreign policy. But I don't see the US involvement in the mass killings conducted by Suharto as something racially motivated against Asians. It was a case of "the only good communist/leftist sympathizer is a dead one".
It also completely ignores the historical context - events like the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, or actions of the Khmer Rouge were still casting a shadow over what people thought would happen if these countries were taken over by Communists.
As a kid I remember learning that the atomic bombs contributed to Japan's surrender in WW2, but as a grown-up I also learned that Russia (a neighboring country) declared war on Japan two days after the first bomb was dropped, and I wonder which made more of a difference.
The US government did a lot of things to affect the way communism was viewed in the US, so I suspect there may have been some official spin involved here.
Having done some light reading on the topic a while ago, I recall there is evidence that of the people deciding on the peace treaty, several were not actually aware of the atomic bombings, given it was only recently learned of by the military a few hours beforehand due to damaged communication infrastructure.
Its basically unknowable, lest we find some memoir of somebody who was present claiming one way or another, especially confounding is the fact that the meeting was planned before the bombings
Only as much as needed to clean-up a predetermined decision for a show of power for the post-war era to fit the official narrative.
(And even if it was "that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population" still wouldn't justify nuking civilians. War crimes are not excused when they make one win more cheaply).
>It's pretty terrible as a weapon of mass destruction. Don't you think that if the US had wanted to annihilate the population of North Vietnam, they would have employed something a bit more direct?
Why would they want to annihilate them? They wanted to win the war. So fucking their livelihood and health over AND still getting to use the hypocritical defense of "see, we weren't meaning to annihilate them" works even better when you need to maintain face.
If anything of the kind was done on their own soil of course, they'll still be screaming bloody murder for all eternity (like Pearl Harbor, even though they purposefully provoked Japan for months before it acted).
> (And even if it was "that a land-based invasion of Japan would be extremely costly for both the invaders and the civilian population" still wouldn't justify nuking civilians. War crimes are not excused when they make one win more cheaply).
War crimes are not, in themselves, "programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination" as claimed by OP, unless they are part of a wider policy. I'd argue if the US had the intention to conduct such a policy, the results would have been very different (as can be deduced by looking at successful genocides).
> Why would they want to annihilate them? They wanted to win the war.
Exactly.
> If anything of the kind was done on their own soil of course, they'll still be screaming bloody murder for all eternity (like Pearl Harbor, even though they purposefully provoked Japan for months before it acted).
I agree that Pearl Harbor needs to be seen in the wider perspective of the US-Japan relationship. And yes, most countries are a lot better at forgetting slights against them than the offenses they themselves committed (ironically enough, both protagonists of the conflict are an excellent example of this problem).
It seems to me that you are arguing that the US disregard the human cost of their foreign policy and have little regard for "collateral damage", not that they have been engaged in some bizarre extermination program of Asians, which is what OP was suggesting.
Beyond saving hundreds of thousand of Allied soldiers, using nuclear weapons on Japan saved millions of JAPANESE lives. The conventional Allied bombing in preparation for invasion would have laid waste to the entire country. (Indeed the conventional firebombing raid on Tokyo killed more civilians than either nuclear strike). And the Imperial government was training civilian (women and children) suicide squads, and Japanese civilians had already conducted mass suicides in the face of capture in places like Saipan.
Out of available targets [1], even taking into account air defense, neither Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem to fit the narrative of the US aiming for maximum civilian casualties. And especially given that Kyoto was struck from the Nagasaki target list as being too culturally significant.
> Or just help Suharto get rid of some millions and let him do the footwork?
That logic completely ignores historical events like the mass starvation under Mao during the Great Leap Forward, the crimes of the Japanese during WW2 (the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, comfort women etc), and millions killed in the post WW2 independence conflicts (partition of India etc).
Putting the blame on the US alone is some seriously inaccurate historical revisionism.
> You can skin a cat in many ways. For one case where the architects of the genocide did not get away with it there are multiple where they did.
Of course. The US genocide of Native Americans did not lead to the Nuremberg trials.
> I am just pointing out that above is not a rebuttal of it.
It is about giving an example of what a policy of genocide lead by a technologically equivalent power looks like, and contrasting it with the actual behaviour of the US in the same area. Shoplifting and murder are both against the law, but there is a marked difference between the two.
The deportations led to the rapid ethnic assimilation of
Ingrian Finns. After 1956, return to Ingria was officially allowed
but made unfeasible in practice;
That's not a genocide, that's a deportation followed by forced cultural assimilation. It's bad, too, but it's not the same thing as exterminating a population.
If we take into account how these deportations usually proceeded and what surrounded them then you can count also on murders, including torturing to death and dying due to extremely inhuman conditions. But this is not important because it would still be genocide without all of it.
Genocide is not killing of people but killing a génos (nation, race, religious group etc).
As the author of the term Raphael Lemkin put
>Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim
of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
So yes, what happened to the Ingrian Finns was a genocide.
Thanks for taking the time to include the quote. However, please don't use code blocks (indentation) for quoting blocks of text like this as it forces side scrolling, which is particularly difficult on mobile devices. It's common on HN to prefix paragraphs with > to indicate a long quote. I also like to italicize block quotes to further set them off. For example:
> Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify…
Thanks! I'm sure those on mobile in particular will appreciate you doing so.
As for indenting block quotes, I agree it would be a nice-to-have, though I think it's unlikely that HN will update the formatting options, at least any time soon. The formatting on HN is limited, though workable.
> America has reserved its most inhumane and destructive weapons to be field tested and then used without hesitation on Asian civilian populations.
I think Africans and Native Americans would beg to disagree. Heck, experiments like the Tuskegee Experiment were done not on foreign Africans but natural born Americans who just happened to have black skin.
Stuff like the Sand Creek massacre, Wounded Knee, and so many others just aren't part of our national (or international) consciousness. No body talks about the intentional sterilization of hundreds of thousands of Native American women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterilization_of_Native_Americ...
The outright genocide and outrages perpetrated against the indigenous and enslaved populations are incomparable, but also a separate topic. I am specifically referring to military munitions with that quote and post; without any diminishment of the grave effects of conventional weaponry and opportunistic germ warfare against Native and African Americans, they have not been nuked, clusterbombed, napalmed, and Agent Oranged to death.
The biggest killer of Chinese in the 19th and 20th century were....other Chinese, not to mention other Asians. I'm not sure why America is singled out when war just happens to be brutal. The PLA has been especially brutal in its treatment of their countrymen (e.g. The siege of Changchun).
Likewise, the north Vietnamese really practiced total war to an extreme, and well, it worked out for them at high costs they were will to pay.
No that's stupid and not even thorough. Did Australia have a genocide campaign in Asia? We were involved in all the same wars. Of course in terms of sheer body count we probably killed more Turks then any other single nationality in the 20th century. But that's my guesstimate based on Gallipoli being a large campaign for us, and in turn brings us back to just how useless and stupid this type of reductionist historical metric is.
Semi-related, our (Australian) hands aren't clean of genocide either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_War is often considered genocide, though there is some debate on the matter.
> I'm not sure why America is singled out when war just happens to be brutal.
Though I agree with the US hardly being "the" aggressor in the world, the second part, that "war happens to be brutal", is precisely the reason starting one was declared the worst crime of all, encompassing all other crimes. You can't just say "oh well, it's war after all".
"The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."
Where does he say that he does no values the life of the "Orientals"?
From his experiences in the war between north and south vietnam or the chinese invovement in Korea it certainly seems that local actors valued the life of their soldiers or civilians less than most western countries would have.
I do not think that this would have been disputed by Ho, Kim or Mao.
You're obviously exaggerating and then some. Most of what you're claiming is fraudulent.
Show me when the US "flattened" Laos and Cambodia: show me the specific, vast invasions, the war details, and the numbers of people that said US wars killed in those nations. You're inventing history. Pol Pot's regime flattened Cambodia, murdering millions of his own people.
The truth you're intentionally evading, is that Asian nations have done drastically worse to each other and or their own people in the last century than anything America has done in the three primary wars the US has been involved in there (all of which were wars of defense/response; defending South Korea, defending South Vietnam, trying to stop the wars of the Empire of Japan). Most of the deaths in the Vietnam civil war as an example, were Vietnamese people killing each other (witness what happened when America left: vast indiscriminate slaughter by the North of the South).
North Vietnam started the war of conquest on the South, which the US attempted to stop. Just as North Korea attempted to enslave South Korea under Communism by military means (and would still like to conclude that 'reunification').
The US expended vast sums of money and blood to keep South Korea from the outcome that North Korea has seen. While China was rotting under Mao, South Korea was being protected and economically nurtured, becoming a first world nation while China and most other nations of Asia were still third world economically (for these purposes, third world meaning the level of economic development, not the definition based on alliance).
The US has protected Japan for 70 years, while they maintained a pacifist constitution. We were far more civil with them post war (a war they started), than what your claims imply we would have been. We didn't hold them as a slave nation, instead they rapidly re-industrialized and ended up passing the US in GDP per capita by the 1980s. We should have nuked them in WW2; they started multiple wars of conquest in the Pacific that resulted in the genocide of millions, including aligning themselves with Hitler's Axis, declaring war on the US and attacking the US. The alternative was to lose hundreds of thousands of American soldiers invading Japan (and one nuke was not enough, they refused to surrender, which logically demonstrated their resolve). The nuking of Japan, or the fire bombing of Tokyo, was no worse than the fire bombing of Germany.
The US also shielded China from being nuked by the USSR [1]. Then we invested extraordinary sums of capital into their economy, providing the economic seed - through mutual trade - that has made their present outcome possible. It was, in part, Nixon's political efforts that helped to open China to the world as a society through trade. Further, given the extreme advantage the US held post WW2 (in every possible regard), it could have attempted to conquer China (or if it were consistent with your false premise: the US could have slaughtered China with nukes), using Japan as a launching point. The US did nearly the exact opposite instead.
The US didn't hold the Philippines, Japan, South Korea, South Vietnam, etc. as conquered territories (it could have attempted it).
Meanwhile, in America, Asians have the highest standard of living of any demographic: they have the lowest crime rates, the highest employment rates, the highest median incomes, the highest household incomes, the highest median net wealth levels, the highest education levels, the longest life expectancy.
Pol Pot's weapons came from China and North Vietnam. Pol Pot sent Cambodian rice to China in exchange for weapons, knowing full well that not enough food would be left for the cambodian population.
Coincidentally, Pol Pot was politicised/radicalised in France by the French communist party, received ideological training in Moscow, Beijing and former Yugoslavia. I imagine that at least some of those who organised Pol Pot's take-over are still alive in in France, the former Soviet Union, China and former Yugoslavia, and could be brought to justice.
Eh, it's a bit more complicated than that (like most things). When the Vietnamese removed the genocidal Khmer Rouge, the United States opposed the action (viewing it as Vietnamese expansionism). The Khmer Rouge joined with other factions to form a coalition that fought the Vietnamese and the new government, and the U.S. supported this coalition.[1][2]
I wouldn't call them powerless; they were waging a guerilla war in the countryside into the 1990's, and were able to retain their seat in the United Nations for some time (with the help of Western governments).
Asian nations have done drastically
worse to each other
Coincidentally, this is true of Africa as well: Mengistu Haile Mariam, Mobuto Sese Seko, Idi Amin, Samuel Doe, or the Tutsi/Hutu conflict were typically much more violent than almost all colonialist behaviour. (Naturally the natives have been colonialising and enslaving each other too.) It's good never to forget this.
That does not mean that colonialism was great, or that anybody wants it back. Hopefully humanity has evolved towards better ways of dealing with each other.
>Every single time that the United States has engaged in conflict with Asian countries, it has waged not war but programs of systematic and indiscriminate extermination.
Really, the US started the war with Japan when Commodore Perry forced Japan, literally at gunpoint, to begin trading with the US in 1853.
The first Opium War had already happened, and the second was about to begin. If the Japanese were to maintain their autonomy and avoid the disastrous fate China suffered as a result of Anglo-Chinese trade, colonial expansion was their only realistic option.
When they attacked Pearl Harbor it was mostly out of desperation, because the oil embargo ordered by Roosevelt placed Japanese imperial operations in imminent jeopardy.
For a less US-centric perspective on the US/Japan war, Noam Chomsky's 1967 essay [0] is worth a read. He doesn't excuse their violence, but he does point out that it was more justifiable than other US violence in South East Asia.
This is a hilarious, sock puppet-esque take on Imperial Japan, which is suitably foot-noted as fertilized by Chomsky's fever dreams of anti-Americanism at any cost. I think the Koreans and the Chinese have a slightly different take on the issue. And the Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam... "The Japanese are a hundred times crueller than the French. Even a worm or a cricket could not live under their brutal violence" (Elliott, 2016).
I'm sure I could improve your life by forcing you to do certain things at gunpoint: are you eating right, saving the maximum possible for retirement, using your time as efficiently as possible, gentle in your relations with everyone?
Whether some Japanese derived some benefit from the ultimatum doesn't change that it was a coercive relationship, enforced by a nation with a history of destructive exploitation of other nations and races, justifying its exploitation in terms of cultural and racial superiority over its subject people. Your argument is straight out of "White Man's Burden."
I think I know a bit more about he subject than you, having studied the Edo era academically and being a licensed instructor in the military techniques carried down by one family of Tokugawa bodyguards, including the oral history that comes with that.
That era was a shitshow ruled over by oppressive sociopathic samurai where life was short, domineering, and often brutal. They kept their country isolated from technology for the only reason of disempowering potential reformers. It is only looked back with fondness by those whose naïveté keeps them from knowing better, or who have nationalistic political agendas.
The gunboat diplomacy was frankly a move of liberation that benefited the people of Japan. And it was not an occupation either -- fair trading terms were what was offered, by the standards of the day, a far better deal than China had for example. Japan was enabled by the deal, turned into a prosperous trading partner and world superpower a mere 40 years later.
I don't know what lense you are looking at his through, but it is not refracting history correctly.
You are correct, but it's orthogonal to anything I said. The point I was making is that feudal Japan was an oppressive, nasty place and gunboat diplomacy, while not bloodless (see the internal conflicts of the Meiji Restoration), was a much smoother transition to prosperity for the inhabitants of Japan than alternative interventions being tried elsewhere.
I don't buy the line that coercive actions are necessarily wrong. Using force to remove a dictator that is oppressing its people (or an entire caste of brutal autocrats) is morally justifiable IMHO. And if you compare the American involvement in Japan with the other sorts of things that were going on at the time in East Asia, it was pretty tame.
Historians must restrict themselves to evaluating choices by the standards of the time under consideration. And by the standards of day, the Japanese got a pretty good deal, especially when compared with their neighbors.
The two are incomparable. A mere 40 years after Perry sailed into Tokyo bay, Japan went from backwater feudal island to an industrial superpower and unshackled itself from the unequal treaties, asserting its dominance on the international stage as an independent, sovereign nation. Nearly 70 years after the fall of the Dalai Lama's regime the people of Tibet are still largely poor and marginalized, with their cities and resources taken over by the occupying Han Chinese that claim the land as their own. The subsidies given to Han Chinese that relocate are straight out of the manifest destiny playbook. So I'm not really sure what point of comparison you are trying to make.
Go read about the China hands in the state department. The USG had a direct hand in abandoning Chiang to Mao and Stalin; setting up the genocides in China and the Korean War.
> the Korean War they dropped more bombs, including napalm and experimental bombs, on the Koreans than all of the bombs dropped in WWI and WWII combined
This seems like an extreme claim. I can't find any reliable source that claims that more bombs than the ones dropped in WWI and WWII combined were dropped to Korea.
> And these are two of the US' closest Asian "allies".
Not back then, Japan had sided with the Axis.
> The US simply hates the Asians
Some far-right people do probably hate Asians in the US, but my experience with the people from the US that I know as well as my experience here in the UK Asians tend to be quite liked.
> This seems like an extreme claim. I can't find any reliable source that claims that more bombs than the ones dropped in WWI and WWII combined were dropped to Korea.
General MacArthur: "The war in Korea has already almost destroyed that nation of 20,000,000 people. I have never seen such devastation. I have seen, I guess, as much blood and disaster as any living man, and it just curdled my stomach the last time I was there. After I looked at the wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited [...] If you go on indefinitely, you are perpetuating a slaughter such as I have never heard of in the history of mankind."
General O'Donnell: "I would say that the entire, almost the entire Korean Peninsula is a terrible mess. Everything is destroyed [...] There is nothing left standing worthy of the name."
General LeMay: "We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both [...]We killed off over a million civilian Koreans and drove several million more from their homes, with the inevitable additional tragedies bound to ensue", "We went over there and fought the war and eventually burned down every town in North Korea anyway, someway or another, and some in South Korea too. [...] Over a period of three years or so, we killed off -- what -- twenty percent of the population of Korea as direct casualties of war, or from starvation and exposure?"
The US Generals were arguing that the use of nuclear weapons would have been more humane, and they might be right. Essentially, being more brutal to end a war quickly is better than holding back to fight for years.
>as well as my experience here in the UK Asians tend to be quite liked.
Worth pointing out that "Asian" in the UK would normally refer to South Asian people - i.e. Indians, Pakistanis, etc. If you meant Far East Asian people, you'd specify that, or the actual country.
> In the Korean War they dropped more bombs, including napalm and experimental bombs, on the Koreans than all of the bombs dropped in WWI and WWII combined.
> The Korean War, a “limited war” for the US and UN forces, was for Koreans a total war. The human and material resources of North and South Korea were used to their utmost. The physical destruction and loss of life on both sides was almost beyond comprehension, but the North suffered the greater damage, due to American saturation bombing and the scorched-earth policy of the retreating UN forces.1 The US Air Force estimated that North Korea’s destruction was proportionately greater than that of Japan in the Second World War, where the US had turned 64 major cities to rubble and used the atomic bomb to destroy two others. American planes dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on Korea -- that is, essentially on North Korea --including 32,557 tons of napalm, compared to 503,000 tons of bombs dropped in the entire Pacific theatre of World War II.2 The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.
Doesn't quite live up to the parent's exaggerated claims, but still not a pretty picture.
"Candace Marie Claiborne, accused of lying to investigators about her contacts with Chinese officials. ...Chinese agents wired cash into her bank account and showered her with gifts ...iPhone, a laptop and tuition at a Chinese fashion school...fully furnished apartment and a stipend."
Recklessness of this is beyond my comprehension, not just accepting cash but also communication and computing devices like iphone and laptop that may have been tampered with.
If you look at the cases where people are caught spying for non-ideological reasons, they usually have some issues that compromise their judgement.
The reward vs. risk ratio seems to be way off. You would assume that successful spy would be worth of tens of millions for the risk of spending rest of his/her life in a prison. Usually they settle for smaller sums. They just want to feel important and have a lifestyle and/or feel loved or have sex.
These people are not carefully selected and trained spies, well versed in opsec. More often they would be weak people given to temptations, and finding the source that could provide them with money and other goodies in exchange for access to whatever information they can lay their hands on. Given how many people work for the government, it's hard to expect every one of them to be impervious to bribery. Actually, we know for a fact many of them are not. So the only difference is that in this case foreigners do the bribing.
Otherwise it's nothing new - e.g. when somebody becomes a multimillionare while working for government or makes some spectacularly lucky investments and gets some unexplainably lucrative deals from people needing the influence in the government - it's completely routine. Most of the times they get away with it. So no one could blame a state dept worker for thinking maybe she could get away with it too.
> By 2013, China’s success in identifying C.I.A. agents had been blunted — it is not clear how.
If I can make a software analogy here, this is the least satisfying resolution to a bug in your program. Imagine a devastating but intermittent bug, that simply disappears after a period of time or after innocuous changes to your program. Not knowing what happened or how it "fixed itself" is very frustrating.
Alternate theory: The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. know exactly how they fixed it, but they won't tell The New York Times that part.
Your alternate theory is likely to be the correct one. As a general rule with very few exceptions, read espionage tales published in the popular press for entertainment not accurate information. The first rule of spying is : EVERYBODY. LIES.
Or in fact they have no meaningful agent program, but they want the Chinese to think they do, so they spend vast resources looking for the CIA's sources and randomly arresting the wrong people. How easy would it be to plant cyber evidence on someone these days? Especially with everyone in China running on devices with govt backdoors, it must be easy.
This is historical, being 7 years old. No one knows for sure when the Office of Personnel Management hack began, only that it was detected, by accident in 2015.
This OPM hack is probably the most damaging for the US government's spying efforts, even more than the Snowden disclosures.
Snowden took only documents that describe the overall global surveillance infrastructure.
Snowden had access to raw data streams for almost all SIGINT operations. System administrators like Snowden received special "root access like" clearance called PRIVAC (Privileged Access) where people allowed to be exposed to information of any classification, regardless of what their position actually needs, apparently because they are sysadmins and need to see what's going on. Snowden had 'technical' access to live feeds for all active operations, drone feeds and other information regardless of classification all over the world was wider than anyone participating in operations had.
It's not hard to imagine that there are other people with PRIVAC access who are actual spies. Just by observing important stuff and not taking anything compromises the system. If they downloaded some of that stuff, it has been open doors all this time.
Only after Snowdon's revelations NSA has added the two-man rule for sysadmins. Apparently it was too costly before. Increasing the data collection was more important than building the system.
I think there is systemic failure in US/UK intelligence organizations. They constantly emphasize offense over defense even when they know that they are very vulnerable. It's hard to show results for good defensive posture.
Access to drone feeds from basically all CIA/DIA operations provides breath of access that compromises the security at completely different level than being part of a operation.
Fair point. Information technology needs refreshing every 3-9 years or so (Moore's Law and such, though Moore treads more lightly over algorithms than he does microchips).
People ... need a years to develop, and could potentially provide useful service for decades. Having an entire cohort of agents removed is a substantial blow.
U.S. reliance on technology is so beyond reasonable at this point that, I'd imagine there's the very real, serious liklihood of something on the level of an Enigma/Lorenz cypher botch that gives away the whole country on a platter.
It's something that I've wondered about for a while now, but really, who am I to question such things?
That's an interesting and scary idea, but keep in mind that a lot has happened since WWII. Back then industrial-mechanical cryptography was seen as this magic wand that made all communications completely inscrutable. Then the Polish and British and others went to such crazy lengths building brute-forcing machines, etc, to actually break these ciphers, and since then the idea of an infallible crypto system is out of style.
So I think the strategy is much different and much more durable now. The military designs ciphers to be resistant to theoretical future quantum computer architectures. They fund research every year to prove various properties of crypto systems. And I'll bet there are lots of fallbacks for any critical infrastructure.
>But the C.I.A.’s top spy hunter, Mark Kelton, resisted the mole theory, at least initially, former officials say. Mr. Kelton had been close friends with Brian J. Kelley, a C.I.A. officer who in the 1990s was wrongly suspected by the F.B.I. of being a Russian spy. The real traitor, it turned out, was Mr. Hanssen. Mr. Kelton often mentioned Mr. Kelley’s mistreatment in meetings during the China episode, former colleagues say, and said he would not accuse someone without ironclad evidence.
You would think that a counter-espionage chief would be much more "paranoid". I would guess that in the world of intelligence, getting "ironclad evidence" of something is probably the exception and not the rule.
Imagine the Chinese here were more paranoid and they killed a dozen honest folk instead. They would have not hampered US efforts in the least and only shot themselves in the foot. See why it's not good to be more paranoid?
You have to consider the risks of false positive vs false negative identification.
From a state point of view, a false positive will cost you the life of a citizen - very unfortunate, and a tragedy - but in the end nobody is irreplaceable.
A false negative exposes the state at risk, which affects everybody, possibly leading to catastrophe. In a risk vs reward scenario, it's vastly better to have a false positive vs a false negative.
But this is not an easy decision to make. We are humans, and emotions and empathy are very strong - we don't want to hurt anybody, and normal people are reluctant to hurt other people no matter how logical it seems.
This is why you want a paranoid in charge - somebody that is so afraid of making a disastrous mistake that the emphaty and emotions are suppressed.
We (the US) imprison people indefinitely for not turning over encryption keys and passwords.
We search and copy laptops and phones at borders, with no kind of court order.
We put non-dangerous people in jail for weeks because they can't pay $500 bond, even though it costs us more to have them in jail than to just forgo the bond payment.
It was just on 60 Minutes last night that in Cook County IL, people are being held in prison so long before being convicted, that by the time they are convicted, they've already served their sentence, and often have served way more than their sentence.
I can forgive the Chinese for killing or imprisoning US spies. I'm sure we do the same thing or worse. As far as I'm concerned, the US has lost any moral high ground when it comes to imprisonment.
Look into The Tourist/Milo Weaver trilogy by Olen Steinhauer. The third book (An American Spy) is where you'll find the US/Chinese intrigues (and an incident that has a similar ring to it as the above news article). I recommend the full trilogy, as the first two books set up the third.
You might also try The Honourable Schoolboy by John Le Carré. Set primarily in Hong Kong, it's part spy novel, part sweeping tour of Southeast Asia just as the last dominos are falling to Communism in the 1970s. Although it's technically in the George Smiley series, I don't think you really need to read those in any particular order.
Steinhauer if you like beach reads/page turners. Le Carré if you like a more literary slow-burner.
I've read just about everything by Le Carré, including, of course, The Honourable Schoolboy. I might check out Steinhauer. I think I read something by him, but can't remember what.
Have you ever seen the anti spying posters in china? They totally are oriented around seduction and recklessness (Chinese girls are warned about handsome foreigners, and so on).
> 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
how can the CIA conclude the problem is resolved when they have no idea what the problem is? this sounds exactly like a government report to CYA (all too familiar if you've ever worked for the USG).
Maybe there was never a problem, maybe this is to make the Chinese think that they got the right people, I mean the NYT is not the CIAs therapist what good is it telling your top secret problems to the press unless you have an angle. But all the same it was a fascinating read.
Between speaking the language fluently and not sticking out when meeting sources, it makes sense to me there would be a lot of ethnically Chinese employees in the spying-on-china division.
Is it legal to spy on another country's government? This article suggests it is legal. Does the US government let chineese operatives work in the US government?
I believe in freedom of speech too. That means that the government should not stifle speech. HN and other such entities have the right regulate speech on their properties.
There is also principle of free speech — you know allowing opinions you don't agree with in your private spaces. Of course unless having bad manners is piece of performance art it is good to observe them and articulate one's position eloquently.
There is a lot to be said about obama era failures on a lot of different levels. Which includes intelligence agencies performance.
I think freshyill got that and was asking if williamle8300 had an actual argument in mind (e.g. Obama supported X policy which prevented the CIA from doing their job effectively in manner Y, precipitating the loss of assets in TFA), or if his comment was just a low-effort "Thanks Obama" knee-jerk based on the conservative "liberals suck at military" yarn. Of course, the answer to that question is just as obvious, but it's a fool's game to meet a low-effort jab with a high-effort, specific reply.
He appointed a person that was leaking information after leaking bodily fluids as the chief of CIA. And he got raised eyebrow and stern talking in return.
That sends very strong signal about how should be treat secrets.
The it is not a big deal narrative about Clinton server also helped in instilling the right sense of respect towards protecting information.
If you think that Uber culture problems and failures are Travis' fault, you cannot let Obama off the hook.
Uh, wait, you're a parody account, right? There aren't truly people still shouting 'But her emuls!' anymore, right? Speaking for everyone outside of the US, how did you guys unearth this crazy? Was it always there?
If there are still those doing this un-ironically, Trump betrays Israel's secret intel and they cry about emails instead. The mental gymnastics are insane.
Every time I read news like this, I remember that nyt has many choices of what to publish and they CHOSED to publish this. Why? It feels like this article is designed to increase sympathy for the CIA.
> 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.
Hillary Clinton was secretary of State from 2009 to early 2013. In October 2010, she traveled to Vietnam for the ASEAN conference while using a personal, older model Blackberry. This timeframe also overlaps with her personal email server.
> In Vietnam in particular, analysts say, there’s a concern Chinese government hackers could pull information from the Vietnamese government-owned telecom — either through an intelligence-sharing agreement with Vietnam or because Vietnamese officials make little effort to keep Chinese spies out of their networks.
Wow, a piece i could read on the NYT. I hope it's not just me, reading this thinking; this story reads so much differently than their typical Trump hit piece. It doesn't take a side, it doesn't try to fire you up, it just informs.
I like being informed. This story is incredible - it shows a massive failure of the US system. The most likely source, a leak inside. A leak they were never truly able to detect.
It bodes for sloppiness. The incredible level of sheer sloppiness we are seeing from the deep state is beyond incredible.
If the reality is the intel services need a bad and serious reshaping, and we are watching them actively try to avoid that possibility. This article exposes a little more truth of the matter.
Our spies have been assassinated. Our most sensitive databases breached. Our own weapons stolen and used for bullshit crap coded ransom-ware. I would hope this story sticks around and becomes a talking point, but the media will strangle this out.
You must not read the NYT much. I just took a glance at their homepage and less than 1/3 of the articles are on US politics. The vast majority of their articles I see on HN have a wide variety of interesting topics -
> They Could Buy, but Why? Meet the High-Renters
> Google, Not the Government, Is Building the Future
> Lyft and Waymo Reach Deal to Collaborate on Self-Driving Cars
> Noncompete Clauses: Signing Away the Right to Get a New Job
> How Harvard Business School Has Reshaped American Capitalism
> China's $1T Plan to Shake Up the Economic Order
> Google is transforming public education with low-cost laptops and free apps
Honestly, I really don't understand how anyone, regardless of where they stand on the political spectrum, can wholesale dismiss the NYT. They do good reporting, solid analysis, and if you don't like their editorial board (just as I have little liking for the WSJ editorial board) - don't read them. This tendency to stick with a limited set a source(s) you agree with is at the core dysfunction of the US government today, imo.
> This tendency to stick with a limited set a source(s) you agree with is at the core dysfunction of the US government today, imo.
If you believe this, you should definitely not read much of any single source. Including the NYT. Unless you have time to read much of many sources, which makes it full-time job.
Though I'd agree with you that if you skip reporting on current US politics, part of the world politics (e.g. all Middle East reporting) and any editorial content on left's causes du jour, NYT may be not that bad.
> The most likely source, a leak inside. A leak they were never truly able to detect.
This is pure conjecture.
It is quite easy to do data mining on your subjects if you aren't actually bound by laws, evidence, or human rights.
The drug lords were using AS/400 mainframes decades ago to ferret out traitors. Sure, they killed a few people who weren't, but, meh, who cares, right? I can't imagine the Chinese government actually cares to any greater degree.
Unless an informant doesn't actually want any tangible benefit, there is going to be SOME trail in the electronic ether nowadays. Even the act of disabling your phone is going to be a trail nowadays.
If you simply kill off anybody who falls afoul of your "standard profile" you're going to get your intelligence agents.
If I was in this game I'd be quite careful about that kind of behaviour, and I'd also be gleefully delighted to get an inkling that my opponent had adopted this strategy.
Why? Because I would assume that my opponent was planting evidence to slander my people, and if I thought that they would act on hints and slanders well - I'd have a fun program of hinting and slandering the keystones of their operations (especially counter intel) as well as I could identify them.
The dominant game here is to trust your operation. The way that you win is to build as capable a trust system as you can thus enabling you to run as large an operation as possible. This is why terrorist networks operate in atoms, they are short duration by definition because they tip their hands with any action so there is no deep network building.
At work I often struggle to understand the motivations of some of my less benevolent colleagues, and this gets me into difficulty from time to time. But, the thing about the Chinese shooting the fella in the office carpark, to me, it doesn't sound like an act that is likely to forge deep bonds in the team.
>It doesn't take a side, it doesn't try to fire you up, it just informs.
By informing, they do take a side. It's just that now you like the side they've taken. I'm not saying that all Trump articles are completely justified - the media feeds on hyperbole and fear after all, but a large number of articles are simply trying to inform when talking about Trump.
Here's the first link I saw today on NYT page (not the biggest one, but one on the top of "Sunday Review" column):
4-Year-Olds Don’t Act Like Donald Trump
By ALISON GOPNIK
Comparing our president to a child is inaccurate and unfair to children.
What is it informing me about? That Trump is not literally 4 years old? Well, thanks a lot. In fact, the whole article is dedicated to describing how Trump sucks so much that comparing anybody to him is an insult. Yeah thanks for "informing" me, I'd never know it if not for NYT reporting.
The term deep state has been around for a long time. It is the group of non-elected people who exert considerable influence from behind the scenes, and that remain from administration to administration. But whatever you want to call it, it is exactly the deep state that facilitates things like yesterday's $350B arms deal with Saudi Arabia.
I find myself having mixed feelings. Generally, I like the idea that there are people who have many years of experience in various positions at all levels of government. In that way the deep state is wonderful. It would be insanity if everyone at all levels got swapped out every 4 years. At the same time it's the deep state who is responsible for the NSA wire-tapping. It's the deep state who began planning our invasion of Syria in 2006 with Israel and Saudi Arabia, long before the Arab Spring or chemical weapons.
So in some sense I think the deep state could use a bit of a shake-up to hopefully get it back in line with what I believe are American values. At the same time I'm afraid of the short term consequences of this shake-up.
On what basis did you assume I was a supporter of US imperialism?
Besides, as far as feudal masters go, the US is despite their colorful history on the more benign end of the cruelty spectrum, which is really saying something about the competition.
Ultimately the regions subjected to American rule would see their conditions deteriorate further if the deep state didn't soften the brutal seesaw motion that inevitably follows the change in leadership.
The deep state unraveling has nothing to do with Trump whatsoever and dates back at least as far as the Snowden leaks and cablegate. Well, I guess it does have a little bit to do with Trump since some of the ways it's unraveling include leaks that seem to be intended to harm Trump but so far have proven to lack substance.
If these were US government workers reporting secrets to the Chinese I would expect imprisonment, etc. I guess it isn't too shocking they would do the same, albeit more cruelly, to their own traitors.
There was a post recently about how easy it was for foreign governments, in the 1970's, to track the actual CIA Officers on station at an embassy. TL;DR: Reading job titles and observing who they hung out with was one way. Also mentioned was that CIA officers rarely intermingled with actual Diplomats and support staff often knew who was who because of secret areas of the embassy that were off limits.
The article mentions a potential hack into the systems but it could have been good old spy-craft by following people and noticing patterns to find the sources.