Free Republic

This story, which broke on Nov. 2, got mighty little attention from the national media. I wonder why: In 2013, hundreds of CIA officers — many working nonstop for weeks — scrambled to contain a disaster of global proportions: a compromise of the agency’s internet-based covert communications system used to interact with its informants in dark corners around the world. Teams of CIA experts worked feverishly to take down and reconfigure the websites secretly used for these communications; others managed operations to quickly spirit assets to safety and oversaw other forms of triage. “When this was going on, it was...

More than 70 foreign nationals working as spies for the CIA in Iran and China were systematically identified and slaughtered in the past decade, due to a ridiculously weak web-based system the CIA used to communicate with foreign assets it couldn’t reach directly. This according to a devastating November 2 report in Yahoo News written by journalists Zach Dorfman and Jenna McLaughlin (center-left, but generally trustworthy). Although the Iranian roll-up occurred in 2011, and the Chinese rout occurred from 2010 to 2012, the CIA did not remedy the root cause of the problem in its transient messaging scheme until 2013,...