This archive report was first published on 23 November 2019.
On November 22, 2019, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a 55-year-old former CIA officer, was sentenced to 19 years in prison for spying for China and betraying his country for greed.
Lee, a naturalised US citizen who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1994 to 2007, was arrested in January 2018 for illegally possessing classified US defence information, which prosecutors alleged he turned over to Chinese intelligence agents.
According to the indictment, Lee began accepting payments from Chinese agents in 2010 while living in Hong Kong, and received hundreds of thousands of dollars and "taskings" for information from two Chinese agents between 2010 and 2012.
However, Lee pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to deliver national defence information to aid a foreign government, while insisting the government never proved he gave the Chinese any information or accepted $840,000 from the Chinese, as alleged.
"Lee betrayed his own country for greed and put his former colleagues at risk," said Timothy Slater, assistant director in the FBI's Washington field office.
The case has driven much speculation about what really lies beneath, because it took the government six years from first investigating Lee to arresting him.
Media reports tied it to the catastrophic destruction of the CIA's web of informants in China between 2010 and 2012, with the New York Times reporting in 2017 that the Chinese killed "at least a dozen" sources the CIA had inside China and imprisoned at least six others.
