They hunted down nearly two dozen of the agency’s sources, executing some of them—including one whom my Times colleagues reported had been “shot in front of his colleagues in the courtyard of a government building” to send a message to others who might have thought about being useful to the Americans. It was both a human tragedy and a huge setback for the CIA, forcing the agency to spend years rebuilding its assets in China and setting off a hunt inside the agency to determine whether an insider had betrayed the spies. The dismantling of the human intelligence network was kept secret in both
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