This is about that time when a British husband and his American wife were brought out of a Chinese prison and out of the country. If it wasn’t for Brittany, I wouldn’t be here today. Brittany, sometime before your birthday in 2015, I showed you this photo below:
As one of the presenters in that conference, Boris Volodarsky (center) was initially identified in the 2013 WAIS Conference program as “former KGB agent”. The program was later corrected and he was introduced as “ex-GRU, Soviet Military Intelligence”. Probably because of the book he published in 2010, Boris Volodarsky was thought of as a former KGB agent. Here’s the copy of the book cover:
On back page: Boris Volodarsky is a former captain of the GRU Spetsnaz, an equivalent of the British SAS, and a member of the World Association of International Studies (WAIS) at Stanford University. Dr Volodarsky is the author of several important books on intelligence history and among them Stalin’s Agent, The Life and Death of Alexander Orlov (Oxford University Press, 2015), a major contribution to the history of Soviet intelligence and foreign policy in its most paranoid phase, according to the Official Historian of the British Security Service MIS. His books are translated into several foreign languages.
At the time I showed you the photo and 2013 WAIS Conference Program, I had not received from Martin Packard the go-signal to proceed and secure the release of two prisoners from a Chinese prison, GlaxoSmithkline employees Peter Humphrey British husband and his American wife Yu Yingzeng. In a WAIS post on Aug. 10, 2014, I answered Martin Packard’s call for help and volunteered to get the couple out of China. And thereafter made all the preparations that could be made. In my estimate the couple would be home by Thanksgiving 2014 or before Christmas 2014 if I started working on it in Aug. 2014. For about two weeks, I checked with Martin Packard every other day, when I could start working on their release. Martin replied saying that both the U.K. and U.S. governments are still working for the couple’s release citing sovereignty issue is a delicate matter.
By Jan. 2015, I thought the couple had been released by then. Something came up and by Feb. 2015, by showing you the photo with Boris Volodarsky and Anthony Candil, a retired Colonel in the Spanish Army, I wanted to somehow tell you what I sometimes do. And I expected you to bail but you didn’t. Then a little over a month later around mid-March 2015, the go-signal from Martin Packard came in. I didn’t expect to get out of that gig in one piece but I did. Thanks to you Brittany.
Here are my FB Check-Ins in March 2015.
March 26,2015: Washington DC; San Francisco, CA; Palo Alto, CA; New Zealand; Quezon City, Philippines.
March 28, 2015: Manila, Philippines, Seyne-Les-Alpes, Provence-Alpes- Cote D’Azur, France; Beijing, China; Paris, France; Los Altos, CA
The challenging part came after Peter Humphrey and Yi Yingzeng were released. I volunteered on Aug. 10, 2014 but was not allowed to make my move until after more than seven (7) months. By September 2015, it became obvious that things will get very complicated and it did starting in Jan. 2016.
I discussed this China episode in this post created on April 1, 2016: WAIS Posts: Discussions with Martin Packard Stanford PhD ’49 and The China Incident.
On May 20, 2017 this NY Times story “Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations” came out. Later more articles about how 18 to 20 CIA assets in China were either executed or arrested and imprisoned or disappeared between Dec. 2010 up to Dec. 2012.
Excerpts: 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. According to three of the officials, one was shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building — a message to others who might have been working for the C.I.A.
But by the end of the year (2010), the flow of information began to dry up. By early 2011, senior agency officers realized they had a problem: Assets in China, one of their most precious resources, were disappearing.
The first signs of trouble emerged in 2010. At the time, the quality of the C.I.A.’s information about the inner workings of the Chinese government was the best it had been for years, the result of recruiting sources deep inside the bureaucracy in Beijing, four former officials said. Some were Chinese nationals who the C.I.A. believed had become disillusioned with the Chinese government’s corruption.
But by the end of the year (2010), the flow of information began to dry up. By early 2011, senior agency officers realized they had a problem: Assets in China, one of their most precious resources, were disappearing.
The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. opened a joint investigation run by top counterintelligence officials at both agencies. Working out of a secret office in Northern Virginia, they began analyzing every operation being run in Beijing. One former senior American official said the investigation had been code-named Honey Badger.
As more and more sources vanished, the operation took on increased urgency. Nearly every employee at the American Embassy was scrutinized, no matter how high ranking. Some investigators believed the Chinese had cracked the encrypted method that the C.I.A. used to communicate with its assets. Others suspected a traitor in the C.I.A., a theory that agency officials were at first reluctant to embrace — and that some in both agencies still do not believe.
Their debates were punctuated with macabre phone calls — “We lost another one” — and urgent questions from the Obama administration wondering why intelligence about the Chinese had slowed.
The mole hunt eventually zeroed in on a former agency operative who had worked in the C.I.A.’s division overseeing China, believing he was most likely responsible for the crippling disclosures. But efforts to gather enough evidence to arrest him failed, and he is now living in another Asian country, current and former officials said.
Killing C.I.A. Informants, China Crippled U.S. Spying Operations
By Mark Mazzetti, Adam Goldman, Michael S. Schmidt and Matt Apuzzo May 20, 2017
By 2017, CIA’s operation in China was severely crippled and they were still trying to figure out what happened. COVID-19 was coming.
This is the second type of activities we are doing. Brittany, I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.
On Feb. 24, 2021, exactly a year before Putin invaded Ukraine, WAISer and former CIA Director James Woolsey appeared on Fox News Sunday hosted by Shannon Bream to promote his recent book: “Operation Dragon”. When asked about Iran, James Woolsey said: “I think the Iranians have cheated SIX WAYS FROM SUNDAY, on it and will continue to.”
After Shannon Bream‘s interview with former CIA Director James Woolsey that was originally aired on February 24, 2021, on Sunday June 6, 2021, USA Today published this article where Charles Faddis, former chief of CIA’s WMD directorate made the same expression: “six ways from Sunday.” At this time, it was no longer a secret that CIA assets in China have been practically wiped out.
Excerpts: “We SHOULD have Wuhan wired SIX WAYS FROM SUNDAY,” said Charles Faddis, former chief of the CIA’s weapons of mass destruction directorate. “And yet 18 MONTHS into this (from Jan. 2020), we’re STILL trying to FIGURE OUT what HAPPENED.”
Faddis and others stressed that the OVERWHELMING MAJORITY of CIA OFFICERS and ANALYSTS are “DEDICATED, patriotic Americans WORKING HARD every day ON BEHALF of their FELLOW citizens.” (So we could live our lives the way we want to; have barbecues, go to concerts; listen to rock and roll; dance etc.)
A few CIA CASE OFFICERS, and many more of their LOCAL agents, HAVE BEEN KILLED, expelled or IMPRISONED overseas when their cover was blown. =================
One of them, a former top CIA Beijing case officer named Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was suspected of giving China the identities of many of the CIA’s most valuable covert assets in the country. He was convicted of conspiring and sentenced in 2019 to 19 years in prison.
Newsham recalled visiting a strategic U.S. ally in Asia in 2007 with other Marine intelligence officers when the CIA station chief said agents didn’t even try to cultivate human intelligence networks in country “because it’s too risky.”
“So I wouldn’t blame it all on Jerry Lee,” the spy who conspired with China, Newsham said. “Instead it’s a far broader and far older problem manifesting itself.”
“But the fact that WE DIDN’T know FROM the BEGINNING WHAT WAS GOING ON in the WUHAN LAB – or even in Zhongnanhai – both targets of prime importance to the USA – is prima facie evidence the CIA ISN’T DOING its JOB,” Newsham, a former diplomat, said in reference to the Beijing compound occupied by its political leaders.
=================
