A former US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official is to be jailed for 15 years after pleading guilty on Friday to charges of attempting to sell classified information to the Chinese, the US Department of Justice said.
Ron Rockwell Hansen, 58, a former DIA operative based in Beijing, was arrested in June last year while preparing to board a flight to China carrying classified information.
Investigators said Hansen, a fluent Mandarin and Russian speaker, had fallen into deep financial trouble from 2013 to 2016 and was paid more than US$800,000 by Chinese intelligence for US secrets.
During that time they found that he had regular meetings with Chinese intelligence agents that he never reported, used cellphones provided him by Chinese sources and retained classified information, to which he was not supposed to have access.
They discovered his work with the Chinese when he in 2016 tried to recruit a fellow intelligence case officer to work with him and the colleague reported the conversation to their superiors.
In a deal with prosecutors, Hansen pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to gather or deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government.
The deal set his sentence at 15 years.
US intelligence has been struggling hard against a Chinese espionage offensive that saw the CIA’s Chinese informant network rolled up by Beijing several years ago and saw several US officials exposed as Chinese spies.
In January last year, former CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee (李春興) was arrested on charges that he sold information to China.
He is reportedly suspected of having provided information that allowed China to bring down the CIA’s network between 2010 and 2012.
Former department official Kevin Mallory was arrested in 2017 for spying for China.
Another US diplomat, Candace Marie Claiborne, was also arrested for taking money from Chinese intelligence officials, although she was not directly accused of supplying information in exchange.
Far from the violence ravaging Haiti, a market on the border with the Dominican Republic has maintained a welcome degree of normal everyday life. At the Dajabon border gate, a wave of Haitians press forward, eager to shop at the twice-weekly market about 200km from Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. They are drawn by the market’s offerings — food, clothing, toys and even used appliances — items not always readily available in Haiti. However, with gang violence bad and growing ever worse in Haiti, the Dominican government has reinforced the usual military presence at the border and placed soldiers on alert. While the market continues to
An image of a dancer balancing on the words “China Before Communism” looms over Parisian commuters catching the morning metro, signaling the annual return of Shen Yun, a controversial spectacle of traditional Chinese dance mixed with vehement criticism of Beijing and conservative rhetoric. The Shen Yun Performing Arts company has slipped the beliefs of a spiritual movement called Falun Gong in between its technicolored visuals and leaping dancers since 2006, with advertising for the show so ubiquitous that it has become an Internet meme. Founded in 1992, Falun Gong claims nearly 100 million followers and has been subject to “persistent persecution” in
ONLINE VITRIOL: While Mo Yan faces a lawsuit, bottled water company Nongfu Spring and Tsinghua University are being attacked amid a rise in nationalist fervor At first glance, a Nobel prize winning author, a bottle of green tea and Beijing’s Tsinghua University have little in common, but in recent weeks they have been dubbed by China’s nationalist netizens as the “three new evils” in the fight to defend the country’s valor in cyberspace. Last month, a patriotic blogger called Wu Wanzheng filed a lawsuit against China’s only Nobel prize-winning author, Mo Yan (莫言), accusing him of discrediting the Communist army and glorifying Japanese soldiers in his fictional works set during the Japanese invasion of China. Wu, who posts online under the pseudonym “Truth-Telling Mao Xinghuo,” is seeking
‘SURPRISES’: The militants claim to have successfully tested a missile capable of reaching Mach 8 and vowed to strike ships heading toward the Cape of Good Hope Yemen’s Houthi rebels claim to have a new, hypersonic missile in their arsenal, Russia’s state media reported on Thursday, potentially raising the stakes in their attacks on shipping in the Red Sea and surrounding waterways against the backdrop of Israel’s war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip. The report by the state-run RIA Novosti news agency cited an unidentified official, but provided no evidence for the claim. It comes as Moscow maintains an aggressively counter-Western foreign policy amid its grinding war on Ukraine. However, the Houthis have for weeks hinted about “surprises” they plan for the battles at sea to counter the