John Bacon

USA TODAY

A report that a crackdown on espionage in China resulted in the death or imprisonment of about 20 people spying for the United States drew cheers but was not verified by China's state-run media Monday.

The New York Timesreported over the weekend that at least a dozen people providing information to the CIA were killed from 2010 to 2012, and several more were imprisoned. The Times said the CIA has struggled with an expensive, time-consuming effort to rebuild the spy network.

The Times report cited 10 former and current U.S. officials it did not name. The CIA declined a USA TODAY request for comment, and USA TODAY was not immediately able to verify the Times report.

China's Global Times wrote an editorial on the Times piece entitled NYT’s spy in China story full of narcissism. The editorial describes as "absurd" that American descriptions of spy activities always portray the U.S. as "the noble side, whether it is catching spies or sending spies" to other countries.

"If this article is telling the truth, we would like to applaud China's anti-espionage activities," the editorial said. "Not only was the CIA's spy network dismantled, but Washington had no idea what happened and which part of the spy network had gone wrong. It can be taken as a sweeping victory."

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The editorial dismissed one Times anecdote about a CIA source being shot in a government courtyard as "most likely a piece of American-style imagination based on ideology."

The Times described the intelligence breach as one of the worst in decades and said U.S. officials had not determined whether a mole within the CIA betrayed the spy network or if that network had been a victim of Chinese hacking.

The Global Times says it is "well known" that the U.S. is the world's largest intelligence gatherer. The editorial also said the story breaks at a time of relatively congenial relations between the two countries and suggests the Times piece could be a new way for "American political elites" to foment distrust.

"The NYT report seems to be a white-knuckle beginning for a new version of Mission: Impossible," the editorial says. "American spies who worked in China disappeared, and some of them died miserably. However, no one knew the reason for their deaths.

"The journalists who wrote the report must have been deeply addicted to the franchise."