Former CIA Officer Suspected Of Helping China Assassinate US Assets Arrested At JFK

A former CIA officer suspected of helping China identify the US spy agency’s informants was arrested at JFK International Airport on Monday on charges of unlawful retention of national defense information, according to the Department of Justice.

“Jerry Chun Shing Lee, aka “Zhen Cheng Li”, 53 – a U.S. Citizen currently living in Hong Kong, began working for the CIA as a case officer in 1994, where he would spend the next 13 years with a Top Secret clearance and signing “numerous non-disclosure agreements,” according to a DOJ press release.

Mr. Lee was at the center of a massive hunt for a mole within the CIA, after the agency noticed its Chinese informants were rapidly turning up dead, which the New York Times labeled a “systematic dismantling of the C.I.A.’s spy network in China starting in 2010.”

The arrest of the former agent, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, capped an intense F.B.I. investigation that began around 2012 after the C.I.A. began losing its informants in China. Mr. Lee was at the center of a mole hunt in which some intelligence officials believed that he had betrayed the United States but others thought that the Chinese government had hacked the C.I.A.’s covert communications used to talk to foreign sources of information. –NYT

According to court documents, Lee and his family left Hong Kong in 2012 to return to the United States and live in Northern Virginia. While traveling, FBI agents conducted court-authorized surveillence of Lee’s room and luggage – discovering that Lee was in unauthorized posession of materials related to national defense. “Specifically, agents found 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,” the NYT reported.

Lee appeared in an New York courtroom Tuesday afternoon where he was ordered held without bail. He faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison if convicted. The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Lee, 53, served in the U.S. Army from 1982 through 1986 and worked for the CIA between 1994 and 2007 according to an affidavit filed by an FBI agent.

The FBI agent wrote that Lee and his family left Hong Kong in August 2012 to travel to northern Virginia. Along the way, they stayed in hotels where the FBI found the books.

The small books were discovered inside Lee’s luggage, sealed in a small clear plastic travel pack.

The handwritten information inside ranged in terms of classification, but the agent said at least one page contained top secret information, “the disclosure of which could cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.” –Reuters

The FBI agent’s affidavit also noted that classified cables written by Lee while he was a case officer describing his interactions with CIA informants corroborated what was found in the two books.

Lee was interviewed five times by the FBI according to Reuters, never disclosing that he had the books. He also met with former CIA colleagues around that time without returning the classified materials, said the Justice Department.

Read more about the case here.

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