A former Central Intelligence Agency officer has been arrested on charges of conspiring with a relative, who also worked for the CIA, to spy for China.
Alexander
Yuk Ching Ma, 67, was arrested on Friday and charged, said the US justice
department.
He is
accused of divulging classified national defence information to Chinese
intelligence officials.
It is
the latest espionage arrest at a time of growing tension between Washington and
Beijing.
Mr Ma is
due to appear in court on Tuesday and faces a maximum penalty of life
imprisonment if convicted.
What do
we know about Mr Ma?
Mr Ma, a
naturalised US citizen born in Hong Kong, began working for the CIA in 1982.
Prosecutors
said he left the CIA seven years later and worked in the Chinese city of
Shanghai before moving to Hawaii in 2001.
They
accuse Mr Ma and his relative of spying for China over the course of a decade
in a scheme that began with meetings in Hong Kong in March 2001.
The
ex-CIA officers are accused of sharing information "about the CIA's
personnel, operations, and methods of concealing communications" with the
Chinese intelligence service.
Part of
their meeting in Hong Kong was recorded on videotape and shows Mr Ma counting
$50,000 (£38,000) in cash for the secrets they shared, the statement said.
While
living in Hawaii, court documents say, he then sought work with the FBI to gain
access to classified US government information once again to pass on to China.
He was hired
by the FBI's Honolulu office in 2004 as a contract linguist and is accused of
stealing documents marked secret.
It
remains unclear why it took so long to arrest Mr Ma.
The
unnamed relative with whom prosecutors say Mr Ma conspired is now 85-years-old.
He is also a naturalised US citizen, who was born in Shanghai.
Court
documents say prosecutors are not seeking an arrest warrant for him at this
time as he is suffering from an "advanced and debilitating cognitive
disease".
What are
the other espionage cases?
This is
the latest arrest in a string of cases against former intelligence officers.
In
November another former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was sentenced to 19
years in prison for conspiring to spy for China.
The
information shared by Mr Lee is said to have helped China to bring down a
network of informants between 2010 and 2012.
About 20
informants were killed or jailed during that period in one of the most
disastrous failures of US intelligence in recent years.
In May
2019, Kevin Mallory, another ex-CIA agent, was sentenced to 20 years in prison,
after being convicted of conspiring to transmit US defence secrets to China.
Former
US intelligence officer Ron Rockwell Hansen was sentenced in September to 10
years in prison.
In
Monday's statement Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C.
Demers said: "The trail of Chinese espionage is long and, sadly, strewn
with former American intelligence officers who betrayed their colleagues, their
country and its liberal democratic values to support an authoritarian communist
regime."
"Whether
immediately, or many years after they thought they got away with it, we will
find these traitors and we will bring them to justice."
Why are
tensions especially high now?
The
relationship between the US and China has plummeted to its lowest point in
decades.
They've
been locked in a bitter trade war since 2018 and earlier this month US
President Donald Trump threatened to ban the popular Chinese app TikTok.
The two
economic superpowers have also clashed over the coronavirus pandemic and the
controversial new security law imposed by Beijing in Hong Kong.
Last
month a Singaporean man pleaded guilty in the US to working as an agent of
China.
According
to court documents he was recruited by Chinese intelligence in 2015, when he
was a PhD student at a prestigious Singaporean university, after giving a
presentation in Beijing.
Jun Wei
Yeo, also known as Dickson Yeo, was charged with using his political
consultancy in America as a front to collect information for Chinese
intelligence.
The US
has also been pursuing economic espionage charges against China in recent
years.
About 80%
of all economic espionage prosecutions brought by the justice department
"allege conduct that would benefit the Chinese state", the department
says on its website.
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