The Epoch Times reported yesterday that Alexander Yuk Chung Ma, a 67-year-old Hawaii resident has been arrested and charged with selling top-secret information to China over the span of a decade, the justice department said.
The article reports:
Ma began working for the CIA in 1982 and later became an FBI linguist.
Prosecutors said Ma worked with a relative who was also a former CIA officer, an 85-year-old Los Angeles man, but he was not charged because he suffers from a “debilitating cognitive disease.”
The charges are the latest in a string of prosecutions targeting Chinese espionage activities in the United States.
Ma, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong, was stationed overseas, where he had a “Top Secret” clearance, prosecutors said. He left the agency in 1989, and then lived and worked in Shanghai before moving to Hawaii in 2000.
Prosecutors said Ma turned allegiances by 2001, when he met several times with at least five officers of China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), the country’s top intelligence agency, in a Hong Kong hotel room. During these meetings, Ma “disclosed a substantial amount of highly classified national defense information,” including the identities of CIA officers and assets, methods of covert communication, information about the CIA’s internal structure, and details about the agency’s spycraft.
The FBI procured video footage of one of the meetings in March 2001, which showed MSS agents paying Ma $50,000, which he counted while relaying the classified information, the court document said. It is unclear how the FBI obtained the footage.
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The article concludes:
The justice department has in recent years brought cases against several current and former U.S. officials accused of supplying secrets to the Chinese regime. Last year, former CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to deliver classified information to Chinese intelligence after leaving the agency in 2010.
“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,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said in a statement.
China is not our friend and has not been a fair trading partner or a responsible member of the world community. It is time to hold them accountable for their spying and for their human rights violations within their country.