China, Pakistan hunting down CIA informants, US sends alert: report

Are China, Pakistan and Russia hunting down CIA informants in their countries?

A report in The New York Times has said that "top American counterintelligence officials have warned every CIA station and base around the world last week about troubling numbers of informants recruited from other countries to spy for the United States being captured or killed.

According to the report, in recent years "adversarial intelligence services" in countries such as Russia, China, Iran and Pakistan have hunted down the agency's sources and turned them into double agents in some cases.

The message was sent in an unusual top secret cable and 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 cable also highlighted "the struggle the spy agency is having as it works to recruit spies around the world in difficult operating environments.

The report also said that sometimes, informants who are discovered by adversarial intelligence services are not arrested, "but instead are turned into double agents who feed disinformation to the CIA, which can have devastating effects on intelligence collection and analysis. Pakistanis have been particularly effective in this sphere," the report quoted former officials as saying.