A longtime CIA officer was sentenced to 19 years in prison on Friday for conspiring to spy for China.
Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, was suspected of being a mole for the Chinese government who compromised CIA sources, some of whom were killed. Prosecutors were unable to prove that Lee, who was a CIA case officer for 13 years, gave classified information to the Chinese, but they argued it explained why he received more than $840,000 while he was being asked for information on the CIA.
Lee admitted he kept notes with the names and numbers of CIA assets and meeting locations but insisted that he never provided the information to his Chinese handlers.
“It’s speculation that this money was for the crown jewels of American intelligence,” Lee’s defense lawyer, Edward MacMahon, told a judge at the sentencing hearing in Alexandria, Virginia.
Prosecutor Neil Hammerstrom acknowledged that it’s not certain how much Lee disclosed to the Chinese but argued “it is all but certain” he passed along information that endangered the lives of CIA sources.
The extent of Lee’s cooperation with the Chinese remains unknown, and he has not been charged with actually passing any government secrets to China.
His case underscores China’s efforts to obtain U.S. secrets. Lee is the third former U.S. intelligence officer to be convicted in the last year of conspiring with the Chinese.
In 2010, Lee, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong, was approached by two Chinese intelligence agents who offered to “take care of him for life” in exchange for national defense information. The two men said they knew about Lee’s past work for the CIA.
Lee reported the approach to a former CIA colleague but did not mention the Chinese offered to pay him for information. He then spent the next few years compiling secret information, including the location of a sensitive operation.
In early 2012, Lee’s former CIA colleague urged him to reapply for a job at the agency, part of a ploy to bring him back to the United States so he could be questioned. Lee was questioned several times by the CIA and lied about receiving tasks from the Chinese and that he kept notes containing classified information.
In two separate searches of his hotel rooms on trips back to the U.S., authorities found classified information in two notebooks and a thumb drive.
G. Zachary Terwilliger, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said in a statement Friday that Lee “sold out his country.”
“I could only say I’m sorry,” Lee said. “I let my country down. I let many people down.”
