Naval intelligence officials familiar with the Chinese spy penetration said the access to both "raw" and analyzed intelligence at Kunia caused significant damage by giving China's government details on both the targets and the sources of U.S. spying operations. Such information would permit the Chinese to block the eavesdropping or to provide false and misleading "disinformation" to U.S. intelligence.
Translators are translators, analysts are analysts. The raw data would be cleansed of as much identifying info as possible before being sent to translation (things like sources). The 'raw' data gets translated. The 'analyzed' data would remain in-house.
Admittedly, the raw data, if correlated with the original transmissions by the ChiCommies, would give them some information on intercepts, and even on whether certain ChiCommie codes had been broken, but there would be no comparison between 'raw' and analyzed data since the translators wouldn't have access to the second.
"There can be no higher target for an intelligence service, and that includes China's MSS and 2 PLA, than gaining access to an adversaries' codes and electronic intelligence," he said, because it is the ultimate in "foreknowledge" advocated by ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu.
Pure garbage. The translators would not have had access to our codes. At best, the ChiCommies would have learned that we are listening in on their conversations. But then they already operate under that assumption (or should).
The highlight of the article is that "it is not known when NCIS learned of the operation". Given that it was counterintel op, we can likely assume that we gave as good as we got.