US authorities on Tuesday said that they had arrested a former CIA agent, Hong Kong resident Jerry Chun Shing Lee (李春興), after discovering he had an unauthorized notebook that had the identities of undercover US spies.
Lee, a naturalized US citizen also known as Zhen Cheng Li (李振成), was arrested late on Monday after he arrived at JFK International Airport in New York.
The US Department of Justice said that Lee, 53, grew up in the US and served in the US Army before joining the CIA as a case officer in 1994.
He served in unnamed overseas locations and left the agency in 2007, later apparently taking a job in Hong Kong.
In a complaint filed in a New York federal court, the department said that in 2012, FBI agents with court-ordered warrants secretly searched Lee’s luggage while he was traveling in the US and found he was carrying top-secret materials he was not authorized to have.
“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 department said.
Lee was charged with unlawful retention of US national defense information, a charge that can bring up to 10 years in prison.
Officials did not say why it took so long to bring charges against Lee, or whether he had leaked any materials to foreign countries.
However, the case takes place amid concern in the US intelligence community that the Chinese government has been able to cripple their operations in that country.
The New York Times last year reported that from 2010 to the end of 2012, the Chinese killed “at least a dozen” sources the CIA had inside China and imprisoned six or more others.
A hunt for a “mole” in the agency led to one person, a “former operative” now living elsewhere in Asia, the paper said.
However, there was not enough information to arrest him.
Others in the agency blamed sloppy work and not a mole, the paper added.
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