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.
Still other former intelligence officials have also argued that the spy network might have been crippled by a combination of both, as well as sloppy tradecraft by agency officers in China. The counterintelligence investigation into how the Chinese managed to hunt down American agents was a source of friction between the C.I.A. and F.B.I.Mr. Lee, who left the C.I.A. in 2007, has been living in Hong Kong and working for a well-known auction house. He was apprehended at Kennedy Airport in New York on Monday and charged in federal court in Northern Virginia with the unlawful retention of national defense information.
He appeared in Brooklyn federal court on Tuesday and is being held there while awaiting transfer to Virginia. He does not have a lawyer, a Justice Department official said. The F.B.I. apparently learned that Mr. Lee was traveling to the United States and scrambled to charge him on Saturday.
Read the Case Against Jerry Chun Shing Lee
Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former C.I.A. officer, is suspected of identifying agency informants to the Chinese government, helping to cripple the United States’ intelligence operations in China. Read the affidavit supporting charges against him.Mr. Lee had previously traveled to the United States in 2012 to live with his family in Virginia. It was during that trip that F.B.I. agents searched his luggage during hotel stays in Hawaii and Virginia and found two small books with handwritten notes that contained classified information. He later made his way back to Hong Kong after being questioned by F.B.I. agents in 2013.
It is unclear why Mr. Lee decided to risk arrest by coming to the United States this month.
In the books the agents found, Mr. Lee had written down details about meetings between C.I.A. informants and undercover agents, as well as their real names and phone numbers, according to court papers. Prosecutors said that material in the books reflected the same information contained in classified cables that Mr. Lee had written while at the agency
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