Alexander Yuk Ching Ma allegedly handed over information about the CIA’s personnel and trade to Chinese intelligence and was given thousands upon thousands of dollars in return.
A naturalized U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong, Ma, 67, told an undercover FBI agent posed as a Chinese intelligence officer earlier this month that he wanted to “succeed” the motherland, according to court documents.
Senior officials called Ma a traitor.
“The trail of Chinese espionage is long and, sadly, at odds with former U.S. intelligence officers who betrayed their colleagues, their country and its liberal democratic values to support an authoritarian communist regime,” said John Demers, the Assistant Attorney General. for national security, in a statement.
Ma, who was arrested on Friday, is accused of conspiracy to communicate information on national defense to help a foreign government. He is scheduled to make his first appearance in federal court in Hawaii on Tuesday.
Much of the espionage of which he is accused happened several years ago. According to court documents, Ma, who served in the CIA from 1982 to 1989, began selling secrets in 2001 amid three days of meetings in a Hong Kong hotel room with five Chinese intelligence officials. Part of the meeting is being videotaped, including a scene in which Ma is seen receiving and counting $ 50,000 in cash, according to prosecutors.
Later, authorities say, Ma took a job as a linguist and translated documents from Chinese at the FBI’s field office Honolulu “as a mechanism to give himself back access to information about US government.” He apparently took a digital camera to the FBI office to photograph sensitive documents which he would then take to his dealers in China.
In the past three years, the Justice Department has brought at least three other cases of counter-intelligence against former U.S. intelligence officials accused of selling secrets to the Chinese, and highlighted some of the brave examples of what officials describe as a broad-based Chinese espionage campaign.
In July, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that “the biggest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality, is China’s threat of economic espionage.”
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