WASHINGTON: A 15-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency was charged Monday with selling US secrets to China and then unwittingly admitting his spying to the FBI.
Alexander Yuk Ching Ma was arrested on Friday on a charge that he conspired with a relative, also a former CIA officer, to communicate classified information to Chinese intelligence officials.
A naturalized American citizen, Ma started working for the CIA in 1982, holding a Top Secret security clearance, according to investigators. He left the CIA in 1989 and lived and worked in Shanghai, China, before arriving in Hawaii in 2001.
Court documents allege that Ma and his relative conspired with Chinese spies to share U.S. classified defence information over a decade.
Twelve years after he retired, Ma met with at least five officers of China’s Ministry of State Security in a Hong Kong hotel room, where he “disclosed a substantial amount of highly classified national defense information,” including facts about the CIA’s internal organization, methods for communicating covertly, and the identities of CIA officers and human assets.
Prosecutors said some of the meeting was recorded on videotape, including a portion 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 employment with the FBI to regain access to U.S. government secrets that he could then turn over to Chinese spy handlers.
“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,” said John Demers, assistant attorney general for national security. “To the Chinese intelligence services, these individuals are expendable. To us, they are sad but urgent reminders of the need to stay vigilant.”
Investigators said that after leaving the CIA, , 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 weapons systems and other U.S. secrets and passed the information to his Chinese handlers, court documents said.