The arrest of a 67-year-old Hawaii resident is the latest case involving former intelligence officers charged with providing classified documents to Beijing.
A former C. I. A. officer was charged with giving classified information to the Chinese government, the Justice Department announced on Monday, the latest in a string of former intelligence officers accused of spying for Beijing. The suspect, Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, worked as a C. I. A. officer in the 1980s and then as a contract translator for the F. B. I. in the 2000s. He was arrested on Friday. According to a criminal complaint, Mr. Ma,67, and an unnamed older relative, now 87 and suffering from debilitating cognitive disease, first provided information to Chinese intelligence officials in March 2001 about C. I. A. personnel, foreign informants, classified operations, cryptography and other methods of concealing communications, secrets for which they were paid $50,000. The accusations against Mr. Ma are the most recent in a series against former intelligence officers. In May 2019, Kevin Patrick Mallory, a former C. I. A. officer, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for spying for China. In November, Jerry Chun Shing Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring to give classified information to China. “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,” John C. Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement. From 2010 to 2012, Chinese officials rounded up many American informants in China, killing many of them and destroying the C.
