Former CIA official charged with helping China dismantle US spy network that left ‘more than a dozen informants dead’

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A 53-year-old former CIA officer has been charged with the unauthorized possession of classified American intelligence, and conspiring to commit espionage, according to the Justice Department.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee has been charged for allegedly helping the Chinese government dismantle a US spy network after being asked by two Chinese intelligence officers in 2010 and 2011 to trade information for money. He lived in Hong Kong at the time.

Mr Lee’s actions allegedly led to the imprisonment or killing of more than a dozen Chinese nationals who were helping the US, which the New York Times reported in January was “one of the most devastating intelligence setbacks for the agency in recent decades”.

The indictment Tuesday follows after Mr Lee’s January arrest on charges of unlawful retention of nations defence information. At that time he had not been charged with espionage.

Federal agents say that they entered hotel rooms that Mr Lee stayed at in Hawaii and Virginia after he left Hong Kong with his family in 2012. The Justice Department alleges that agents who searched his room found that he “was in unauthorized possession of materials related to national defence”.

Those materials included handwritten notes on CIA employees, and a thumb drive with classified materials.

“Mr Lee is not a Chinese spy,” Edward MacMahon, Mr Lee’s attorney, told reporters in February during a court appearance. “He’s a loyal American who served his country in the military and in the CIA.”

Mr Lee, who is a naturalized US citizen, and top-secret clearance and worked as a field agent for the CIA from 1994 until 2007.

The indictment of Mr Lee states that he was approached by Chinese intelligence officers two years after he left the CIA, and offered to be paid for information.

It is not clear why the FBI waited so long to arrest Mr Lee, though it is also not clear how frequently he visited the United States before his arrest in January at John F Kennedy International Airport in New York.

He faces up to a lifetime in prison if convicted on the charges.