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SAUL LOEB
Mr. Ma was caught on video collecting cash for secrets
A former Central Intelligence Agency official has been arrested on charges of conspiracy with a family member, who also worked for the CIA, to spy on China.
Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 67, was arrested Friday, the U.S. Justice Department said in a statement, and charged.
He is accused of telling classified national defense information to Chinese intelligence officials.
It is the latest arrest for espionage in a time of growing tension between Washington and Beijing.
Mr Ma will appear in court on Tuesday and is expected to face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment if convicted.
What do we know about Mr. Ma
Mr. Ma, a naturalized American citizen born in Hong Kong, began working for the CIA in 1982.
Prosecutors say he left the CIA seven years later and worked in the Chinese city of Shanghai before moving to Hawaii in 2001.
They accused Mr Ma and his relative of spying for China over the course of a decade in a scheme that began with meetings in Hong Kong in March 2001.
The ex-CIA officers are accused of sharing information “about personnel, operations, and methods of concealing communications” with the Chinese intelligence service.
A portion of their meeting in Hong Kong was videotaped showing Mr Ma counting $ 50,000 (£ 38,000) in cash for the secrets they shared, the statement said.
While living in Hawaii, court documents say, he then sought work with the FBI to re-access classified information about U.S. government to pass on to China.
He was hired by the FBI’s Honolulu bureau in 2004 as a contract linguist and is accused of stealing documents marked secret.
It remains unclear why it took so long to arrest Mr Ma.
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The unnamed family member with whom prosecutors say Mr Ma has teamed up is now 85 years old. He is also a naturalized American citizen, who was born in Shanghai.
Court documents say prosecutors are not currently seeking an arrest warrant for him because he suffers from an “advanced and debilitating cognitive illness”.
What are the other espionage cases?
This is the latest arrest in a string of cases against former intelligence officers.
In November, another former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was sentenced to 19 years in prison for conspiracy to spy on China.
The information shared by Mr Lee is said to have helped China bring down a network of informants between 2010 and 2012.
About 20 informants were killed or imprisoned during that period in one of the worst failures of American intelligence in recent years.
In May 2019, Kevin Mallory, another ex-CIA agent, was sentenced to 20 years in prison after being convicted of conspiracy to hand over US defense secrets to China.
Former United States Secretary of State Ron Rockwell Hansen was sentenced in September to 10 years in prison.
In a statement issued Monday, Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said: betrayed to support an authoritarian communist regime. “
“Whether it’s right now, or many years after they thought they were gone with it, we’ll find these betrayals and we’ll bring them to justice.”
Why are tensions especially high now?
Relations between the US and China have dropped to their lowest point in decades.
They have been embroiled in a bitter trade war since 2018 and earlier this month US President Donald Trump threatened to ban the popular Chinese app TikTok.
The two economic superpowers have also clashed over the coronavirus pandemic and the controversial new security law imposed by Beijing in Hong Kong.
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Dickson Yeo / Facebook
Dickson Yeo was accused of gathering information for Chinese intelligence
Last month, a Singaporean man pleaded guilty in the US to working as an agent for China.
According to court documents, he was recruited by Chinese intelligence in 2015, when he was a PhD student at a prestigious Singaporean university, after giving a presentation in Beijing.
Jun Wei Yeo, also known as Dickson Yeo, was accused of using his political advisory bureau in America as a front to gather information for Chinese intelligence.
The US has also pursued economic espionage lawsuits against China in recent years.
About 80% of all economic espionage prosecutions brought by the Justice Department “conduct behavior that would benefit the Chinese state,” the department says on its website.
