Washington: Former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee could spend the rest of his life behind bars after pleading guilty Wednesday to spying for China, the US Justice Department said.
Lee, 54, was arrested in January 2018, suspected of having provided information on a CIA network of informants that was brought down by China between 2010 and 2012. He pleaded guilty before a US District Court judge in the Eastern District of Virginia of to conspiring to provide national defence information to China. Lee, a former CIA case officer, left the Central Intelligence Agency in 2007 and moved to Hong Kong.
According to the Justice Department, he was approached by two Chinese intelligence officers in April 2010. They offered to pay Lee $100,000 for information and to take care of him ‘for life’ in exchange for his cooperation, said a statement issued by the Justice Department.
It said that in May 2010, Lee created a document on his laptop that described where the CIA assigns officers and the ‘particular location and timeframe of a sensitive CIA operation’. It said the FBI had also recovered handwritten notes made by Lee related to his work for the CIA.
“These notes included, among other things, intelligence provided by CIA assets, true names of assets, operational meeting locations and phone numbers and information about covert facilities,” the Justice Department informed.
John Brown, the FBI’s assistant director for counterintelligence, said that Lee’s actions had ‘dangerous ramifications’. “By knowingly aiding a foreign government, 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,” Brown said.
It should be stated here that last month Ron Rockwell Hansen, 58, a former Defence Intelligence Agency official, was sentenced to 15 years in prison last month after pleading guilty to charges of attempting to sell classified information to China.
FBI Director Christopher Wray said last week that China poses the most serious intelligence threat to the United States.