You might be giving the CIA a little too much credit.
When operating overseas, CIA officers almost always present themselves as officials or staff from sister agencies like the State Department.
So while they can be PNG'd, their black passports tend to preclude anything more severe.
There's been chatter for at least a decade about upping the CIA's NOC workforce, but kind of skeptical the CIA has any long term NOCs in China right now, especially after Evan Gershkovich got picked up in Russia.
You know, it's almost as if the CIA had a large group of disgruntled employees who were about to get fired
According to NYT, the list consisted of recent hires from the past two years, and operatives can take a lot longer to train than that. So doubtful anyone operational in a non-permissive environment got burned.
If anything, whoever botched this -- if that was indeed the case -- might have thought they were saving their babies/mentees/subordinates from what they envision would be Trump's inevitable betrayal down the road.
> Might as well as burn their names now rather than let Trump burn them in the field.
Trump's critics wanted to make a fiasco out of the publication of that imagery, but kind of doubtful anyone who does IMINT professionally was surprised by the resolution.
