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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Nuclear engineer sentenced for violating Atomic Energy Act

A TAIWANESE/AMERICAN nuclear engineer was sentenced last week to 24 months in prison and one year of supervised release for producing nuclear material in China in violation of the Atomic Energy Act. He was also ordered to pay a $20,000 fine. 

Szuhsiung Ho, aka Allen Ho, 66, a naturalized U.S. citizen, pleaded guilty in January 2017 to conspiracy to unlawfully engage or participate in the production or development of special nuclear material outside the U.S., without the required authorization from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), violating the Atomic Energy Act.

Szuhsiung  'Allene' Ho

“Today, (Aug. 31) Allen Ho is being held accountable for enlisting U.S.-based nuclear experts to provide assistance in developing and producing special nuclear material in China for a Chinese state-owned nuclear power company. He did so without the required authorization from the U.S. Department of Energy,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Dana J. Boente.

An April 2016 indictment charged Ho; China General Nuclear Power Company (CGNPC), the largest nuclear power company in China and Energy Technology International (ETI), a Delaware corporation with these offenses. 

At the time of his indictment, Ho was a nuclear engineer, employed as a consultant by CGNPC and was also the owner of ETI. CGNPC specialized in the development and manufacture of nuclear reactors and was controlled by China’s State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.

According to documents, beginning in 1997 and continuing through April 2016, Ho conspired with others to engage or participate in the development or production of special nuclear material in China.

The DOJ said in a press release that Ho aided China by recruiting engineers and other experts to advise it on faster ways to design and build components for some types of nuclear reactors.

RELATED: Civil Rights Commission asks for probe of possible racial profilng of Asian American scientsts

The intellectual and engineering aid he helped funnel toward China helped it reduce costs and cut development time for novel reactor types, said the Justice department.

Ho came to the US in 1973 to attend the University of California, Berkeley and married his wife Anne a year later. He received a PhD in nuclear engineering from the University of Illinois in 1980, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen three years later.

Ho's lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg, has defended several Asian/American scientists facing espionage-related charges, and he says his clients have been targeted because of their ties to China.

"If their ties were to France or their ties were to Italy or Scandinavia, their conduct would never come under the radar of the [Justice] Department. It's a bright red flag," he says.

A former federal prosecutor, Zeidenberg adds that he understands the challenge presented by Chinese economic espionage. But he believes his former colleagues are overreacting. "They have been way too quick to pull the trigger on these cases and others," he says. "They see conspiracies and patterns and malevolent conduct, when there isn't any."

A lawsuit brought by Xiaoxing Xi, a Temple University scientist whose charges of espionage were dropped, was filed in May this year, alleges the FBI of racial profiling.

The FBI, which investigates cases of espionage, did not want to comment on specific cases, but denied the allegations of racial profiling. "The FBI does not initiate investigations based on an individual's race, ethnicity, national origin or religion," said the FBI in response to a query from NPR.

Ho's case was a multi-agency investigation by the FBI, Tennessee Valley Authority-Office of the Inspector General, DOE-National Nuclear Security Administration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations and other government agencies.
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