A 15-year-old CIA veteran was accused on Monday of selling US secrets to China, when his spies unknowingly confessed to the FBI.
Prosecutors of the method said they used him to discover that the nature of his espionage was worthy of a spy novel itself.
Court documents show that 67-year-old Alexander Yuk Ching Ma from Honolulu was accused of violating US espionage laws. Prosecutors said he joined the CIA in 1967, and then served as a CIA officer until he retired from the agency in 1989. For part of that time, he was assigned to work abroad in the East Asia region. and Pacific.
Twelve years after he retired, prosecutors said Monday that Ma met with at least five officials from China’s State Security Ministry in a hotel room in Hong Kong, where he “revealed a substantial amount of highly classified information on national defense,” he said. including facts about the CIA’s internal organization, methods of covert communication, and the identities of CIA officers and human assets.
“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, assistant attorney general for national security. “To the Chinese intelligence services, these people are spending. For us, they are sad but urgent reminders of the need to remain vigilant.”
After leaving the CIA, investigators said, Ma got a job as a Chinese linguist in the FBI’s Honolulu field office. He used his new job and security clearance to copy or photograph classified documents related to guided missile and weapon systems and other American secrets and passed the information on to his Chinese traders, court documents said.
When the FBI became aware of Ma’s activities, prosecutors said, an undercover FBI agent told a meeting, posing as a representative of the Chinese government. The undercover operative claimed to be conducting an investigation “into how Ma was treated, including the amount he was compensated,” court documents said.
A video recording showed Ma counting $ 2,000 in cash provided by the undercover operative, who said it was to recognize his work on behalf of China. Investigators said Ma, who was born in Hong Kong, said he wanted to “succeed” in the “motherland” and admitted that he provided classified information to the Ministry of State Security and continued to work with some of the same representatives who the 2001 meeting.
Prosecutors say an 85-year-old Ma’s family member also worked for the CIA and later spied for China. But he was not charged because he suffers from “an advanced a debilitating cognitive illness.”
The charges against Ma represent the latest in a series of rebuttals against US efforts to target espionage on China.
Another former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was sentenced last year to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty to collusion with Chinese intelligence agents in early 2010 after he left the agency. NBC News reported that information he provided to China and other peoples helped compromise the CIA’s method of secretly communicating with its foreign agents, leading to the deaths of Chinese informants.
In 2015, the U.S. government revealed that Chinese intelligence hackers had stolen frames of sensitive personnel from the Office of Personnel Management, including security security applications from intelligence officers and other national security guards. U.S. officials said they were concerned that data and other personal information about U.S. citizens stolen by the Chinese from private companies allowed China to better identify U.S. operations that were spying abroad.
