CIA pulls staff from Beijing following a cyber attack on government employees
Computers were hacked in April in one of the worst cyber hacks of US government data in history
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testifies at a House (Select) Intelligence Committee hearing on "World Wide Cyber Threats" on Capitol Hill in Washington Photo: Reuters
By Charlotte Middlehurst, Shanghai
10:39AM BST 02 Oct 2015
CIA operatives have been withdrawn from China amid fears over their safety following one of the worst cyber hacks of US government data in history.
Computers belonging to the American office of personnel management (OPM) were hacked in April, compromising the details of approximately four million government employees.
Although the White House refrained from pointing fingers publicly, privately, US officials said the Chinese government was believed to be behind the hack.
The US intelligence service responded by pulling a number of officers from the American embassy in Beijing as a “precautionary measure”, according to a report by the Washington Post.
The decision was taken to protect personnel whose agency affiliation might be discovered as result of the hacked data.
The stolen data, a gold mine of information on US spies and army personnel, included background checks, intimate details of their sex lives, drug use and finances.
During Xi Jinping’s first visit to the White House last week, President Barack Obama announced that he had reached a "common understanding" with the Chinese president on curbing economic cyber espionage, but threatened to impose sanctions on hackers who persisted in their crimes.
"It has to stop," said the president at a White House news conference on September 26.
China has strongly denied involvement in a number of cyber crimes in recent years. Following the OPM hack in April, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy to the US called allegations “not responsible and counterproductive".
James R Clapper Jr, director of National Intelligence, said the OPM case was not an "attack" but instead a form of theft or espionage, at a Senate hearing on September 29.
“We, too, practise cyber espionage and ... we’re not bad at it,” he said, cautioning the United States to tread carefully when punishing other countries for acts committed by its own intelligence services.
In November 2014, a cyber attack compromised the private files of more than 25,000 department of homeland security workers and thousands of other federal employees.
