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Recent Appearances...

China-Japan-Koreas

Ex-CIA agent arrested, charged with spying for China for years

2020-08-18

[AmericanMilitaryNews] A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer was arrested and faces charges he spied for China for years.

Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 67, a 15-year agent of the CIA, was charged Monday for selling U.S. secrets to China, NBC reported. Ma reportedly disclosed a substantial amount of highly classified national defense information" to five members of the Chinese Ministry of State Security, including the identities of CIA officers and human assets, information about the CIA’s internal organization and means of CIA communications.

Ma worked for the CIA from 1967 to 1989 and was assigned to work overseas in the East-Asia and Pacific region during part of his CIA tenure. The meeting between Ma and the Chinese officers reportedly happened about 12 years after his retirement from the agency, around some time in 2001. According to the charging documents obtained by the Los Angeles Times, Ma kept in touch with his Chinese contacts as he applied for an FBI position in 2004. Over the next six years, Ma allegedly downloaded, collected or otherwise photographed sensitive information to pass along to China until he stopped work for the FBI in 2010.

Ma was reportedly caught after the FBI began a sting operation in January of 2019. The FBI had reportedly held suspicions about Ma for years but it is not clear as to why the FBI waited as long as it had to investigate Ma.

President Trump doesn’t like spies and traitors, whether serving the Deep State or a foreign state, and does not exempt Communist China.

As part of the sting operation, an FBI agent pretended to be a Chinese government auditor reviewing the Chinese governments handling of Ma as an intelligence source. The FBI agent reportedly showed Ma a video of his 2001 meeting with the Chinese officials to gain Ma's trust. It was not immediately clear how the FBI obtained the footage.

After playing the footage, the FBI agent gained Ma's trust and got him to admit in further meetings that he worked for the Chinese.
Meaning, he had been 'flipped' by the Chinese and at some point had become a double agent.
According to the charging documents, Ma told the agent he "wanted ‘the motherland' to succeed" and said he would consider working again for the Chinese government, "perhaps as a consultant."

Ma is charged with conspiring to communicate national defense information to aid a foreign government and, if convicted, faces up to a life term in prison.

Ma is not the only former CIA agent to face charges of spying for China. In May of 2019, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 54, a former CIA case officer and U.S. Army veteran admitted to spying for China. Lee reportedly devised a document on his computer on May 26, 2010, that detailed specific locations where CIA officers were, as well as the precise location and time frame of a sensitive CIA operation, which was all secret level classified information. He then transferred the sensitive information to a thumb drive, he used to transfer the information.

The New York Times reported in November that Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison.

So it seems reasonable that Mr. Ma should get the same.

Link

-Lurid Crime Tales-

Ex-CIA officer sentenced to 19 years for China conspiracy

2019-11-23

[The Hill] A former CIA officer has been sentenced to 19 years in prison after he was convicted of conspiring to turn over U.S. intelligence information to China's government.

Prosecutors said that Jerry Chun Shing Lee, who was with the agency for 13 years, had direct knowledge of sensitive secrets, according to NBC News.

Lee was not charged with giving China any intel, according to NBC.

A judge said "it is all but certain" he gave information to China, but Lee's lawyer said "the government has offered only conjecture as a basis for these claims."

Lee reportedly pleaded guilty in May to a charge of conspiring to give national defense information to a foreign country. He was arrested in 2018 after FBI agents said they found notebooks and a flash drive with information and phone numbers of CIA personnel, details about an operation and information about facilities.

He reportedly admitted to a 2010 meeting with Chinese intelligence officials who said they would pay him and "take care of him for life" in exchange for secrets.

Link

-Lurid Crime Tales-

Former CIA Officer Charged With Spying For China

2018-09-01

[NPR.ORG] An ex-CIA officer tossed in the calaboose
Yez got nuttin' on me, coppers! Nuttin'!
in January at New York's John F. Kennedy airport has been charged with conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of China years after FBI agents turned up notebooks containing classified information in a search of his hotel room.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, a naturalized U.S. citizen, had a top-secret clearance and worked as a field agent for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1994 until 2007. He was living in Hong Kong at the time of his arrest, and had apparently been the target of an FBI investigation since 2012, when agents searching a Honolulu hotel room discovered handwritten notes on "asset meeting, operational meeting locations, operational phone numbers, true names of assets, and covert facilities" pertaining to China, according to a court affidavit.

After leaving the CIA, Lee worked for Japan Tobacco International, formed his own company and later joined Christie's auction house in Hong Kong, The South China Morning Post reports.

It is not known why the FBI waiting so long after uncovering the notebooks to arrest Lee; however, it is also not clear how frequently he traveled to the U.S., where his eventual arrest took place.

Link

Fifth Column

Botched CIA Communications System Helped Blow Cover of Chinese Agents

2018-08-17

Via this thread at Ycombinator's Hacker News. Another exciting episode of Masters of Tradecraft.
[ForeignPolicy] The number of informants executed in the debacle is higher than initially thought.

It was considered one of the CIA’s worst failures in decades: Over a two-year period starting in late 2010, Chinese authorities systematically dismantled the agency’s network of agents across the country, executing dozens of suspected U.S. spies. But since then, a question has loomed over the entire debacle.

How were the Chinese able to roll up the network?

Now, nearly eight years later, it appears that the agency botched the communication system it used to interact with its sources, according to five current and former intelligence officials. The CIA had imported the system from its Middle East operations, where the online environment was considerably less hazardous, and apparently underestimated China’s ability to penetrate it.

"The attitude was that we’ve got this, we’re untouchable," said one of the officials who, like the others, declined to be named discussing sensitive information. The former official described the attitude of those in the agency who worked on China at the time as "invincible."

Other factors played a role as well, including China’s alleged recruitment of former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee around the same time. Federal prosecutors indicted Lee earlier this year in connection with the affair.

But the penetration of the communication system seems to account for the speed and accuracy with which Chinese authorities moved against the CIA’s China-based assets.

"You could tell the Chinese weren’t guessing. The Ministry of State Security [which handles both foreign intelligence and domestic security] were always pulling in the right people," one of the officials said.

"When things started going bad, they went bad fast."

The former officials also said the real number of CIA assets and those in their orbit executed by China during the two-year period was around 30, though some sources spoke of higher figures. The New York Times, which first reported the story last year, put the number at "more than a dozen." All the CIA assets detained by Chinese intelligence around this time were eventually killed, the former officials said.
But don't worry, they'll protect us from having a president who's been peed on by Russian prostitutes, that's for sure. Never mind that everyone else who sides with the US against the commies winds up as a horrible example.
Platte River Network (PRN) 'home brew’ servers and Nellie Ohr ham radio training could have prevented much of this unpleasantness, had they not been on other assignments.

Link

China-Japan-Koreas

Solving the CIA’s Mass Murder Mystery (Zhen Cheng Li)

2018-01-20

[Observer] However, the most serious such setback in recent years occurred in China, where in 2010 the CIA’s secret agents began disappearing, never to be heard from again. As many as 20 Chinese nationals who were on the Langley payroll went silent over a two-year period; they were jailed and, in at least a dozen cases, killed. Like Tehran, Beijing has no qualms about shooting traitors. One of the unmasked spies was shot in front of colleagues, in a government courtyard, to send a message about the consequences of collaborating with American intelligence.

Such a vast compromise was an indelible sign that something had gone seriously wrong inside the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Practically the agency’s whole clandestine network inside China was systematically dismantled by Beijing’s counterspies, with lethal consequences. To any counterintelligence veteran, this meant one of two things: Langley had a well-placed Chinese mole or the CIA’s secret communications had been compromised.

This all looked eerily like the major-league mid-1980s disaster, when more than a dozen Soviets who were spying for the CIA—many of them senior intelligence officials—were arrested and, in most cases, executed. Virtually the whole stable of CIA’s agents in Moscow was taken out in a a few months, an unmissable sign that something had gone badly wrong. Debate raged over exactly what happened, and it took nine years for counterspies to identify CIA officer Aldrich Ames as a turncoat and the culprit in most (though not all) of those losses.

By 2012, when it became obvious that something similar had happened in China, a joint CIA-FBI investigation commenced and quickly got bogged down in the usual bureaucratic rivalries plus the lack of hard evidence. Codenamed HONEY BADGER, the top-secret inquiry repeated many of the patterns that plagued what became the Ames investigation. Now, as then, CIA officials were sheepish about contemplating the possibility of a mole at Langley—something that FBI agents considered plausible—and much attention focused on possible communications compromises. Sometimes sloppy tradecraft by CIA officers in handling their Chinese sources was looked at—but could it explain the loss of 20 agents, a whole spy network?

Now, we may be getting some answers, at last, with the announcement this week by the Department of Justice that it made an espionage arrest on Monday night. Arrested at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York was 53-year-old Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA officer, who had been a focus of counterintelligence investigation for years. Born Zhen Cheng Li, he emigrated to the United States with his family, served two years in the U.S. Army, and joined the CIA in 1994, working as a case officer until he resigned in 2007. Lee believed his career had stalled, and he left the agency disgruntled—which is always a potential warning sign to counterintelligence investigators.

Upon examining Lee’s career and what he had access to while working in CIA espionage operations, he looked like a good fit for a possible mole. However, his departure from the agency and subsequent move to Hong Kong (where, investigators believed, his new job had been arranged by Chinese intelligence) complicated matters. He was therefore lured back to the United States in mid-August 2012 for meetings in Honolulu, ostensibly for possible work on a CIA contract, and while Lee was busy, FBI agents, armed with a search warrant, took apart his hotel room.

What they found is spelled out in the DoJ affidavit: “two small books containing handwritten notes that contained classified information, including but not limited to, true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations and locations of covert facilities.”

Possessing such information is a serious crime as a well a violation of the non-disclosure agreements that Lee signed when he joined the CIA. Moreover, it’s difficult to conjure up a benign explanation of why a former agency case officer took such sensitive and highly classified information home with him—and then traveled around the world with it in tow. FBI agents questioned Lee about his foreign contacts during his Hawaii visit, but during a total of five interviews while Lee was in the United States, they did not interrogate him about his “two small books.” Lee eventually returned to Hong Kong, a free man.

Investigators in Washington observed that the roll-up of the CIA’s agents in China halted after Lee’s trip to Hawaii, and although he remained the prime suspect behind Langley’s counterintelligence debacle, he remained out of reach in Beijing-controlled Hong Kong. His appearance in New York this week made him accessible to the FBI, which placed him in custody, apparently after attempting to get him to talk about his secret activities.

It should be noted that Lee has been charged with “unlawful retention of national defense information,” which can lead to 10 years in federal prison, but DoJ has made no mention of any connection to the 2010-12 spy disasters. Neither is there any indication so far that Lee will face charges relating to the deaths of CIA agents in China, notwithstanding that he’s still the top suspect in that investigation.

This wouldn’t be the first time that the FBI has arrested a turncoat on lesser charges in the hopes of coercing a confession to more serious crimes. However, if Lee doesn’t talk, prosecutors may be facing serious obstacles, particularly because the Intelligence Community never likes to see its secrets discussed in open court—especially when what’s revealed is unflattering.
This is a high-profile case that illustrates many of the IC’s persistent counterintelligence problems. In particular, the wisdom of using Chinese immigrants to spy on their native land seems unwise, given Beijing’s habit of ruthlessly exploiting Overseas Chinese for espionage. We can expect calls of “racial profiling” to appear soon, even though the only racial profiling here is done by Chinese intelligence by recruiting their co-nationals abroad for espionage against their adopted countries. Above all, if Jerry Lee is a traitor who got several CIA agents killed, he needs to face justice for that crime.

John Schindler is a security expert and former National Security Agency analyst and counterintelligence officer.

Link

-Lurid Crime Tales-

Ex-C.I.A. Officer Suspected of Compromising Chinese Informants Is Arrested

2018-01-17

[NYT] WASHINGTON ‐ A former C.I.A. officer suspected by investigators of helping China dismantle United States spying operations and identify informants has been arrested, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. The collapse of the spy network was one of the American government’s worst intelligence failures in recent years.

The arrest of the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, capped an intense F.B.I. inquiry that began around 2012, two years after the C.I.A. began losing its informants in China. Investigators confronted an enduring mystery: How did the names of so many C.I.A. sources, among the agency’s most dearly held secrets, end up in Chinese hands?

Some intelligence officials believed that a mole inside the C.I.A. was exposing its roster of informants. Others thought that the Chinese government had hacked the C.I.A.’s covert communications used to talk to foreign sources of information.

Skipping down a bit:

Mr. Lee, who left the C.I.A. in 2007, has been living in Hong Kong and working for a well-known auction house.
"Left the C.I.A. in 2007...? Yes of course.

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