The Justice Department said on Friday that a former CIA official who was the target of an undercover FBI operation pled guilty to providing the People’s Republic of China with national security material.
According to the DOJ, citing the plea agreement, 71-year-old Honolulu resident Alexander Yuk Ching Ma had seven years of experience as a CIA officer in the 1980s. In 2001, he conspired with an unidentified third party to provide Chinese intelligence “with a large volume of classified U.S. national defense information” for tens of thousands of dollars.
Inquiries on the guilty plea have been made by AWN to Ma’s legal team.
After that, Ma applied to the Honolulu Field Office of the FBI to work as a linguist, and he did so from 2004 to 2012.
The DOJ release states that Ma was employed by the FBI to work at an off-site location. The purpose of this arrangement was to allow for the monitoring of his activities and the investigation of his contacts with the PRC, since the FBI was aware of Ma’s ties to PRC intelligence.
According to earlier reports from AWN, Ma allegedly used a digital camera while working under surveillance for the FBI to take pictures of confidential information, which he would then send to his Chinese handlers.
According to Friday’s statement by the Justice Department, “Ma confessed that he knew that this information, and the information communicated in March 2001, would be used to injure the United States or to benefit the PRC,” referring to a specific batch of sensitive documents that were sent to Chinese intelligence personnel.
The United States government agencies have requested that Ma participate in debriefings as part of her cooperation obligations, as stated in the parties’ plea agreement, as reported by the Department of Justice.
