By Ankit Panda
The CIA is pulling officers out of China as a direct result of the OPM breach.
Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has pulled its officers from the U.S. embassy in Beijing. The move was undertaken by the agency a “precautionary measure,” the report notes, to avoid any possible retaliation against these officers in the wake of data acquired by Chinese hackers in a breach of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
The OPM breach, announced earlier this year, resulted in the theft of over 20 million records, including fingerprints and SF-86 security clearance forms. The source of the hack has been widely attributed to the Chinese government, though the United States has not officially said so.
The CIA’s move is necessary to protect officers who may be discovered by a simple cross-referencing of the State Department records obtained in the OPM breach against declared U.S. Embassy personnel records in Beijing. “Anybody not on that [State Department] list could be a CIA officer,” the Post report notes.
Read the full story at The Diplomat