Former CIA officer arrested and charged with espionage

Alexander Yuk Ching Ma

A former CIA officer was arrested Aug. 14 and charged with spying for China.

Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 67, is accused with conspiring with a relative of who also was a former CIA officer to communicate classified information up to the Top Secret level to intelligence officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). 

“The trail of Chinese espionage is long and, sadly, strewn with former American intelligence officers who betrayed their colleagues, their country and its liberal democratic values to support an authoritarian communist regime,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers. 

 “This betrayal is never worth it," continued Demers. "Whether immediately, or many years after they thought they got away with it, we will find these traitors and we will bring them to justice. To the Chinese intelligence services, these individuals are expendable. To us, they are sad but urgent reminders of the need to stay vigilant.”

Ma is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong. According to court documents, Ma began working for the CIA in 1982, maintained a Top Secret clearance, and signed numerous non-disclosure agreements in which he acknowledged his responsibility and ongoing duty to protect U.S. government secrets during his tenure at CIA. Ma left the CIA in 1989 and lived and worked in Shanghai, China before arriving in Hawaii in 2001.

According to court documents, Ma and his relative (identified as co-conspirator #1) conspired with each other and multiple PRC intelligence officials to communicate classified national defense information over the course of a decade. 

The scheme began with three days of meetings in Hong Kong in March 2001 during which the two former CIA officers provided information to the foreign intelligence service about the CIA’s personnel, operations, and methods of concealing communications. Part of the meeting was captured on videotape, including a portion where Ma can be seen receiving and counting $50,000 in cash for the secrets they provided.

The court documents further allege that after Ma moved to Hawaii, he sought employment with the FBI in order to once again gain access to classified U.S. government information which he could in turn provide to his PRC handlers. 

In 2004, the FBI’s Honolulu Field Office hired Ma as a contract linguist tasked with reviewing and translating Chinese language documents. Over the following six years, Ma regularly copied, photographed and stole documents that displayed U.S. classification markings such as “SECRET.” 

Ma took some of the stolen documents and images with him on his frequent trips to China with the intent to provide them to his handlers. Ma often returned from China with thousands of dollars in cash and expensive gifts, such as a new set of golf clubs.

According to court documents, in spring 2019, over the course of two in-person meetings, Ma confirmed his espionage activities to an FBI undercover employee Ma believed was a representative of the PRC intelligence service, and accepted $2,000 in cash from the FBI undercover as “small token” of appreciation for Ma’s assistance to China. 

Ma also offered to once again work for the PRC intelligence service. On August 12, 2020, during a meeting with an FBI undercover employee before arrest, Ma again accepted money for his past espionage activities, expressed his willingness to continue to help the Chinese government, and stated that he wanted “the motherland” to succeed.

Ma will make his initial appearance before a federal judge tomorrow in the U.S. District Court for the District of Hawaii. He is charged with conspiracy to communicate national defense information to aid a foreign government and faces a maximum penalty of life imprisonment if convicted. 

“This serious act of espionage is another example in a long string of illicit activities that the​People's Republic of China is conducting within and against the United States,” said Alan E. Kohler Jr., Assistant Director of the FBI's Counterintelligence Division.

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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Former CIA officer arrested may have endangered US covert operatives

Former CIA employee Jerry Chun Sing Lee

JERRY CHUN SING LEE, aka Zhen Cheng Li, 53, a former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer, was arrested Jan. 15 on charges of unlawful retention of national defense information.

Some have linked him to what has been considered one of the U.S. government’s most serious intelligence failures of recent years, after several informants in China were killed or imprisoned.

Lee was arrested after arriving at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York. Lee is a naturalized U.S. citizen, currently residing in Hong Kong, China. According to court documents, Lee began working for the CIA as a case officer in 1994, maintained a Top Secret clearance and signed numerous non-disclosure agreements during his tenure at CIA.

According to court documents, in August 2012, Lee and his family left Hong Kong to return to the United States to live in northern Virginia. While traveling back to the United States, Lee and his family had hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia. During each of the hotel stays, FBI agents conducted court-authorized searches of Lee’s room and luggage, and found that Lee was in unauthorized possession of materials relating to the national defense. 

Agents found two small books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.

Lee left the CIA in 2007 after 13 years with the agency. At that point, he should have surrendered the notebooks with that vital information.

Lee made his initial appearance last Monday in the Eastern District of New York. He is charged with unlawful retention of national defense information and faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if convicted. 

Relatives who live in California said his wife, who is in Hong Kong, and his daughter, who lives in Virginia, were trying to hire a lawyer. The family members declined further comment.

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