Former CIA officer charged with giving China classified info
Washington DC: A former CIA officer and contract linguist for the FBI has been charged with spying for China, including by disclosing tradecraft and information on sources to Chinese intelligence officers who had co-opted him, according to documents unsealed Monday.
Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 67, was arrested last week after an undercover operation in which prosecutors say he accepted thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for his past espionage activities.
He told a law enforcement officer who was posing as a Chinese intelligence officer that he wanted to see the motherland succeed and that he was eager to resume helping China after the Coronavirus pandemic subsided, prosecutors said.
The trail of Chinese espionage is long and, sadly, strewn with former American intelligence officers who betrayed their colleagues, their country and its liberal democratic values to support an authoritarian communist regime, Assistant Attorney John Demers, the Justice Department's top national security official, said in a statement.
An FBI affidavit accuses Ma, who worked for the CIA from 1982 to 1989, of revealing government secrets to at least five Chinese intelligence officers in a Hong Kong hotel room over a three-day period in March 2001.
Those secrets included information about CIA sources and assets, international operations, secure communication practices and operational tradecraft.
Prosecutors say Ma's meeting with the Chinese officers included a relative and fellow CIA employee who was not named in court documents and who is not being charged because, officials say, the now 85-year-old suffers from advanced and debilitating cognitive diseases.
A video recording of the hotel meeting shows the men receiving payments of USD 50,000 for the information they provided, the authorities
said.
By that point, the FBI says, Ma had become a compromised asset of China's Ministry of State Security, which collects intelligence information of value and interest to the Chinese government a relationship that endured for years and carried over into Ma's next job.
Ma remained in touch with the Chinese intelligence officers after he joined the FBI as a contract linguist in 2004, at which point he used his work computer to copy images of documents related to missiles and weapon system technology research.
