Eleven former intelligence and US government officials recounted the fiasco under condition of anonymity. The agency asked its informants to communicate via websites. A double agent allegedly showed the Iranian intelligence the server assigned to it. The authorities then looked for other similar sites. To do this, the spies of the Islamic Republic have used advanced functions of Google search engine (dorking).
Dorking is a practice used to explore the sites more in-depth: detect all those who use such a module of connection to a site, look for such term in the address of a site, or a type of documents hosted on a server etc. Thanks to the double agent site, the Iranian services were able to map all the servers of this type, then find out who was using them in Iran, thus updating a spy network (30 people according to the statements of Iranian officials in Iran in 2011). These informants were imprisoned and even executed for some.
The same communication protocol between the CIA and its sources has had the same effects in China. Here too, Langley's agents were decimated. A CIA officer had also tried to alert his hierarchy on these flaws. In vain, his warnings were not listened to and he was transferred to another organization. This communications system was supposed to be temporary, but above all it was not designed for opponents such as China or Iran.
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