Sino-American Double Loyalty

Ex-C.I.A. Officer Sentenced to 19 Years in Chinese Espionage Conspiracy

Jerry Chun Shing Lee pleaded guilty to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents

By Zach Montague

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, pleaded guilty in May to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents.

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A former C.I.A. officer was sentenced to 19 years in prison on Friday for conspiring to deliver classified information to China in a case that touched on the mysterious unraveling of the agency’s informant network in China.
The former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, pleaded guilty in May to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents starting in 2010, after he left the agency. 

Prosecutors detailed a long financial paper trail that showed that Lee received more than $840,000 for his work.
Lee, an Army veteran, worked for the C.I.A. from 1994 to 2007, including in China. 

After he resigned, he formed a tobacco company in Hong Kong with an associate who had ties to the Chinese intelligence community. 

Lee then began meeting with agents from China’s Ministry of State Security, who assigned him tasks he admitted to taking on and offered to “take care of him for life.”
While working in Hong Kong in 2010, Lee reapplied for employment with the C.I.A. but misled American officials repeatedly in interviews about his dealings with Chinese intelligence officers and the source of his income.
Around the time Lee began speaking to Chinese agents, the C.I.A. was rocked by major setbacks in China as its once-robust espionage network there began to fall apart. 

Between 2010 and 2012, dozens of C.I.A. informants in China disappeared, either jailed or killed, embroiling the agency in an internal debate about how Chinese intelligence officers had identified the informants. 

Many within the agency came to believe that a mole had exposed American informants, and Lee became a main suspect.
But F.B.I. agents who investigated whether he was the culprit passed on an opportunity to arrest him in the United States in 2013, allowing him to travel back to Hong Kong even after finding classified information in his luggage. 

F.B.I. agents had also covertly entered a hotel room Lee occupied in 2012, finding handwritten notes detailing the names and numbers of at least eight C.I.A. sources that he had handled in his capacity as a case officer.
The investigators apparently decided that by continuing to quietly monitor Lee, they might glean more clues about the disappearing C.I.A. informants in China. 

But even after his arrest in 2018 on the same charge the C.I.A. was prepared to bring in 2013, they were unable to determine whether Lee was involved in the disclosures to Chinese intelligence operatives.
Because of Lee’s plea agreement, in which he admitted to one count of possessing information classified as secret — a lower level than top secret — prosecutors asked for a relatively lighter sentence of roughly 22 to 27 years, rather than life in prison.
But prosecutors argued that even if Lee never turned over information to Chinese intelligence officers, the fact that he shared his knowledge of American intelligence work with Chinese agents alone could have a chilling effect on the C.I.A.’s source-building efforts.
“It makes it difficult to recruit people in the future if they know the C.I.A. isn’t protecting their people,” said Adam L. Small, a federal prosecutor in Northern Virginia, where Lee was charged. 

“These are people who put their names and lives in his hands.”
The sentence for Lee is the latest in a string of recent cases in which American intelligence workers have been handed lengthy prison terms for espionage connected to China. 

In announcing Lee’s sentence, Judge T. S. Ellis III said that a hefty sentence was necessary to deter others from jeopardizing American intelligence.
In May, another C.I.A. case officer, Kevin Patrick Mallory was sentenced to 20 years in prison for selling classified documents to a Chinese intelligence officer for $25,000. 

Judge Ellis, who presided over that case as well, decided that a life sentence for Mallory was excessively harsh even though prosecutors showed he successfully transmitted secret information.
In September, Ron Rockwell Hansen, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, received 10 years in prison for attempting to pass along defense secrets.

In announcing the sentence, Judge Ellis said he was not convinced that Lee’s interactions with Chinese intelligence officers were benign, and that it is common in espionage cases to never fully uncover the extent of illicit dealings.
While he acknowledged that Lee, a naturalized citizen born in Hong Kong, had done a great deal with his life as an American — four years in the Army, a 13-year career with the C.I.A. — Judge Ellis appeared unmoved.
“That gets erased,” he said, “when you betray your country.”

Trial begins for former CIA officer accused of spying for China

By David Shortell

A rare espionage trial began Wednesday in Virginia as a jury heard testimony rife with references to covert communications devices and blocks of stashed cash payouts.
In a shabby hotel room in Shanghai last year, three Chinese men, all surnamed Yang, had questioned Kevin Patrick Mallory, a former CIA covert officer, about the new Trump administration's foreign policy. 

What did he know about the THAAD missile system? 

The administration's stance on the South China Sea?
"They were a little bit coy," Mallory later recalled. 

"I asked them point blank" if they worked for the government and "they didn't deny it."
Mallory was sitting across from a CIA investigator in the spy agency's headquarters in May of 2017 as he recounted the episode and how a headhunter had approached him on LinkedIn for what he thought was an interview for a job consulting with a Chinese think tank.
This week in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, Mallory sat next to defense attorneys as video from that CIA meeting played out -- a central piece of evidence in the case brought by the Justice Department accusing him of spying.
As tension between the US and China climbs amid threats of a trade war, Mallory's case is emblematic of another challenge from the superpower: aggressive new efforts by Chinese intelligence to go after American state secrets, experts say.
It could mean a life sentence for the 60-year-old Virginia man. 

Deciphering the case may be a challenge for the men and women of the jury, who heard two divergent motivations behind a fact that Mallory does admit: that he sent four pages of documents to the Chinese men and received from them thousands of dollars that he did not properly declare on customs intake paperwork.
Mallory "betrayed his country" and sold classified information to the Chinese to stave off "mounting personal debt," prosecutor Jennifer K. Gellie said.
He had "fallen on hard times," Mallory's defense attorneys conceded, but the former Army veteran is a "loyal and patriotic American who has served his country with distinction throughout his life."
They said he had grown suspicious that his interviewers were in fact intelligence operatives and "tried to string the Chinese agents along" and warn the CIA so as not to let an opportunity to learn about an adversary's sources and methods "slip away."
The trial in the Eastern District of Virginia is expected to last at least a week. 

The government says it will call witnesses from the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, where Mallory had also been employed.
Jury members on Wednesday briefly saw the documents Mallory transmitted over a modified Samsung cellphone that Gellie said contained discussion of human source information.
Mallory's attorney, Geremy C. Kamens, said one document was so "generic" that it had no use, and called two pages of handwritten notes that accompanied it "essentially gibberish."
Two CIA employees testified Wednesday -- one under a pseudonym and behind a folding wall so as to remain anonymous -- about a series of phone calls and text messages they'd received from Mallory asking them to put him in contact with officials in the agency's East Asia division before and after his meetings in Shanghai.
Mallory had stopped working as a CIA case officer in 1996 and left an intelligence position at the DIA in 2010, but had known one of the men through his church, and the other through consulting work Mallory had done at the CIA from 2010 to 2012, according to court documents and testimony.
"He was practically begging to set up a meeting," Kamens said.
Days after he finally landed the May 2017 sit-down at CIA headquarters, Mallory took the Samsung phone to a follow-up meeting with the CIA investigator at a Virginia hotel, officials testified Wednesday. 

Two FBI special agents were also there to interview Mallory and review the contents of the phone.
On June 22, 2017, Mallory was charged with delivering defense information to aid a foreign government and making false statements, and has pleaded not guilty.
His arrest is one in a string of high-profile Chinese espionage cases in the past two years that Peter Mattis, a former intelligence official and China expert, says is on trend with a recent generational shift in the Chinese intelligence apparatus.
"In terms of coming after and trying to get sources in the US intelligence community, [the Chinese] have become more aggressive and they've got better tradecraft and they're putting more money into it," Mattis said.
Former State Department employee Candace Marie Claiborne is fighting charges in the District of Columbia that she lied to the FBI about her failure to report thousands of dollars' worth of gifts she allegedly received from two Chinese intelligence agents. 

Claiborne has pleaded not guilty.
Earlier this month, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a former CIA case officer believed to have helped China identify and kill members of the US spy network in the country, pleaded not guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage.
"As far as we can tell from public reporting Kevin Mallory [was paid] $25,000 for a handful of documents," Mattis said. 

"That's a fairly hefty chunk of money for a relatively small amount of information."