Former CIA agent guilty of spying for China

Former CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee pleads guilty of betraying his country.

A former Central Intelligence Agency officer responsible for the deaths or imprisonment of a dozen CIA informants seriously crippling U.S. intelligence efforts in China has pleaded guilty to spying for China, states the U.S. Justice Department.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 54, pleaded guilty Tuesday (May 1) for giving Chinese intelligence officers information he had acquired as a CIA officer and accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars for that information.

“This is the third case in less than a year in which a former US intelligence officer has pled or been found guilty of conspiring with Chinese intelligence services to pass them national defense information,” said Assistant Attorney General John C. Demers. “Every one of these cases is a tragic betrayal of country and colleagues."

According to The New York Times, Lee, who held top secret clearance during his time with the intelligence agency, eventually became a suspect in a 2012 FBI investigation into how more than a dozen CIA informants were killed or imprisoned by the Chinese government.

Last year the newspaper reported that starting back in 2010, the Chinese government began systematically dismantling the CIA's spying operations in the country — killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.

The FBI reportedly began to suspect an insider had revealed sensitive information to the Chinese government.

According to court documents, Lee left the CIA in 2007 and began living in Hong Kong. In April 2010, two Chinese intelligence officers (IOs) approached Lee and offered to pay him for national defense information he had acquired as a CIA case officer. The IOs also told Lee they had prepared for him a gift of $100,000 cash, and they offered to take care of him “for life” in exchange for his cooperation.

In 2012, Lee, a U.S. Army veteran, moved his family to northern Virginia.

In August 2012, the FBI conducted a court-authorized search of a hotel room in Honolulu, Hawaii where Lee and his family were on vacation. The search revealed that Lee possessed the thumb drive within his personal luggage. The FBI forensically imaged the thumb drive and later located the document in the unallocated space of the thumb drive, meaning that it had been deleted. 

The recovered document described, among other things, locations to which the CIA would assign officers with certain identified experience, as well as the particular location and timeframe of a sensitive CIA operation. 

The search of the thumb drive also revealed that Lee possessed a day planner and an address book that contained handwritten notes made by Lee that related to his work as a CIA case officer prior to 2004. These notes included, among other things, intelligence provided by CIA assets, true names of assets, operational meeting locations and phone numbers.

In subsequent interviews, Lee denied any knowledge of the document or thum drive and its contents. Later he said he created the document as a kind of diary.

Lee was finally arrested in January of 2018

Lee pleaded guilty to conspiracy to deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government and faces a maximum penalty of life in prison when sentencing occurs on Aug. 23, 2019. Actual sentences for federal crimes are typically less than the maximum penalties.

“By knowingly aiding a foreign government, Mr. Lee put our country’s national security at serious risk and also threatened the safety and personal security of innocent people, namely his former intelligence colleagues. He deserves to answer for his treachery," said Assistant Director for Counterintelligence John Brown of the FBI.

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