Alexander Yuk Ching Ma allegedly handed over details about the CIA’s personnel and tradecraft to Chinese language intelligence and was given tens of hundreds of {dollars} in return.
A naturalized US citizen born in Hong Kong, Ma, 67, instructed an undercover FBI agent posing as a Chinese language intelligence officer earlier this month that he needed “the motherland” to succeed, in line with courtroom paperwork.
Senior officers referred to as Ma a traitor.
“The path of Chinese language espionage is lengthy and, sadly, strewn with former American intelligence officers who betrayed their colleagues, their nation and its liberal democratic values to help an authoritarian communist regime,” John Demers, the assistant legal professional normal for nationwide safety, stated in a press release.
Ma, who was arrested on Friday, is charged with conspiracy to speak nationwide protection data to help a overseas authorities. He’s scheduled to make an preliminary look in Hawaii federal courtroom on Tuesday.
A lot of the espionage he’s accused of occurred a number of years in the past. In response to courtroom paperwork, Ma, who served within the CIA from 1982 to 1989, started promoting secrets and techniques in 2001 amid three days of conferences in a Hong Kong lodge room with 5 officers from Chinese language intelligence companies. A part of the assembly is captured on video, together with a scene through which Ma is seen receiving and counting $50,000 in money, in line with prosecutors.
Later, authorities say, Ma took a job as a linguist translating paperwork from Chinese language on the FBI’s area workplace Honolulu “as a mechanism to as soon as once more give himself entry to US authorities data.” He allegedly took a digital digicam into the FBI workplace to {photograph} delicate paperwork that he would then take to his handlers in China.
Up to now three years, the Justice Division has introduced no less than three different counterintelligence instances towards former US intelligence officers accused of promoting secrets and techniques to the Chinese language, marking a few of the extra brazen examples of what officers describe as a broad Chinese language espionage marketing campaign.
In July, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated that “the best long-term menace to our nation’s data and mental property, and to our financial vitality, is the counterintelligence and financial espionage menace from China.”
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