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WASHINGTON — Justice Department said on Tuesday a former C.I.A. officer suspected of helping China identify the agency’s informants in that country has been arrested.
NEW YORK TIMES reported many of the informants were killed in a systematic dismantling of the C.I.A.’s spy network in China starting in 2010 that was one of the American government’s worst intelligence failures in recent years, several former intelligence officials have said.
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.
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 and was living in Hong Kong, was apprehended at Kennedy International Airport and charged in federal court in Northern Virginia with the unlawful retention of national defense information.
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In 2012, Mr. Lee returned to the United States with his family. F.B.I. agents investigating him searched his luggage during a pair of hotel stays, and found two small books with handwritten notes that contained classified information.
Prosecutors said that in the books, he had written down details about meetings between C.I.A. informants and undercover agents, as well as their real names and phone numbers.
More than a dozen C.I.A. informants were killed or imprisoned by the Chinese government. The extent to which the informant network was unraveled, reported last year by The New York Times, was a devastating setback for the C.I.A.
During those searches, which appear to have been conducted surreptitiously, FBI agents found two small books determined to contain information classified up to the “Top Secret” level that pertained to Lee’s CIA work.
“The datebook contained handwritten information pertaining to, but not limited to, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations, operational phone numbers, true names of assets, and covert facilities,” FBI Special Agent Kellie O’Brien said in an affidavit submitted on Saturday to a federal magistrate judge in Alexandria, Virginia.
“The address book contained true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, as well as the addresses of CIA facilities.”
SOURCE: NEW YORK TIMES/ THE POLITICO
