The arrest of the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, capped an intense FBI inquiry that began around 2012, two years after the CIA began losing its informants in China.
The arrest of the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, capped an intense FBI inquiry that began around 2012, two years after the CIA began losing its informants in China.
WASHINGTON — A former CIA officer suspected by investigators of helping China dismantle United States spying operations and identify informants has been arrested, the Justice Department said Tuesday. The collapse of the spy network was one of the U. S. government’s worst intelligence failures in recent years.
The arrest of the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, capped an intense FBI inquiry that began around 2012, two years after the CIA began losing its informants in China. Investigators confronted an enduring mystery: How did the names of so many CIA sources, among the agency’s most dearly held secrets, end up in Chinese hands?
Some intelligence officials believed that a mole inside the CIA was exposing its roster of informants. Others thought that the Chinese government had hacked the CIA’s covert communications used to talk to foreign sources of information.
Still other former intelligence officials have also argued that the spy network might have been crippled by a combination of both, as well as sloppy tradecraft by agency officers in China. The counterintelligence investigation into how the Chinese managed to hunt down U. S. agents was a source of friction between the CIA and FBI.
Lee, who left the CIA in 2007, has been living in Hong Kong and working for a well-known auction house. He was apprehended at Kennedy Airport in New York on Monday and charged in federal court in Northern Virginia with the unlawful retention of national defense information. He appeared in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday and is being held there while awaiting transfer to Virginia. He does not have a lawyer, a Justice Department official said. The FBI apparently learned that Lee was traveling to the United States and scrambled to charge him on Saturday.
Lee had previously traveled to the United States in 2012 to live with his family in Virginia. It was during that trip that FBI agents searched his luggage during hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia and found two small books with handwritten notes that contained classified information.
