“The discovery of these websites by Iranian and Chinese counterintelligence led to the imprisonment and execution of several assets in those countries, and subsequent shutdown of the channel by the CIA when they noticed that things had gone wrong.”
Reuters published nine of the CIA’s covert communication sites in September 2022. Citizen Lab claimed 885 but kept the list private. Starting from those nine, Santilli found a few hundred more with public data alone. If one person with DNS records can rebuild the network, Iran and China had it easy, and the assets paid with their lives.