CIA Launches China Mission Center to Confront Beijing - FARS

 (FNA)- The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has launched a China mission center to confront perceived threats from Beijing, CIA Director William Burns stated on Thursday.

The center was formed "to address the global challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China that cuts across all of the Agency’s mission areas", a CIA statement shared with the media read, Sputnik reported.

Earlier, a media report emerges claiming that CIA officers working overseas have been warned that troubling numbers of informants recruited to spy for the United States are being captured or killed.

The message, in a top secret cable, said that the CIA’s counterintelligence mission center had looked at dozens of cases in the last several years involving foreign informants who had been killed, arrested or most likely compromised, The New York Times report reported on Tuesday.

In recent years, adversarial intelligence services in countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan have been hunting down the CIA sources and in some cases turning them into double agents, the report added.

The large number of compromised informants in recent years demonstrated the growing prowess of other countries in employing innovations like biometric scans, facial recognition, artificial intelligence and hacking tools to track the movements of CIA officers in order to discover their sources, the report said.

The warning was primarily aimed at front line officers, the people involved most directly in the recruiting and vetting of sources, the report said, citing unnamed people who had read the cable.

The cable reminded CIA case officers to focus not just on recruiting sources, but also on security issues including vetting informants and evading adversarial intelligence services, the report added.