WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A former Central Intelligence Agency official has been arrested and charged with spying for China in a scheme involving a family member who also worked for the CIA, the U.S. Justice Department said on Monday.
It said in a statement that Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 67, was arrested on Friday on a charge he conspired with a relative, also a former CIA officer, to communicate classified information to Chinese intelligence officials. The criminal complaint was made unsafe on Monday.
A naturalized American, Ma began working for the CIA in 1982, with Top Secret security. Prosecutors say Ma left the CIA in 1989 and lived and worked in Shanghai, China, before arriving in Hawaii in 2001.
Prosecutors say the unnamed family member with whom Ma collaborated also worked as a CIA spy, but resigned from the agency in 1983 following allegations that she used her official position to help Chinese citizens enter the United States. to go.
Prosecutors said around 1998 that Ma’s relative was convicted of embezzlement at a lending institution, but said the relative, now 85, was not charged in the present case with an “advanced and debilitating cognitive illness.”
Prosecutors say Ma’s spying began in March 2001, in which the two former CIA officials provided information to China about the personnel, operations and methods of concealing communications.
Prosecutors said some of a meeting was recorded on a videotape in which Ma can be seen counting $ 50,000 in cash he received for secrets.
Court documents say that after Ma moved to Hawaii, he sought work at the FBI to gain access to US government secrets which he could then transfer to Chinese spy officers.
The FBI’s Honolulu bureau hired Ma in 2004 as a linguist, court documents say.
The CIA and FBI declined to comment on why it took so long to arrest him. My lawyer, Craig Jerome, could not be immediately reached for comment.
Report by Daphne Psaledakis and Mark Hosenball; Edited by Dan Grebler and Richard Pullin
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