Huh? There's nothing in the Post's information that would preclude both from having happened, so it's would be a stretch to call it a lie even from that article. But in fact, the original blog post[1] talks about multiple goals of the main attack, including listing the targeted attack that the GP is probably referencing as independent from the attack that "resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google". I think it's you that's confusing incidents.

> Third, as part of this investigation but independent of the attack on Google, we have discovered that the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users' computers.

edit: ah, and the GP wasn't even talking about the gmail accounts.

[1] http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/31/technology/chinese-hackers...

Also, what kind of spy uses gmail? Sheesh.

The kind that is trying to maintain cover as a non-spy so uses the same email services as everybody else.

Of course, that means the joke's on them, because the NSA was listening to everyone...

On the other hand if you want to read people's mail, then hacking into the provider is certainly an option.

On the other hand, we don't really know what the Chinese knew, or thought they knew, about Google and how it functioned WRT government surveillance. If they had reason to believe that Google would be cooperating with authorities and would have infrastructure in place to monitor email accounts that they could look for and identify if it was monitoring the accounts they were looking for, then this explanation makes a bit more sense.