Former CIA officer charged with selling classified information to China

(KYMA, KECY)-A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer was charged on Monday for selling U.S. secrets to China.

NBC News reports 67-year-old Alexander Yuk Ching Ma of Honolulu was charged with violating U.S. espionage laws.

Prosecutors said he joined the CIA in 1967 then served as a CIA officer until he retired from the agency in 1989. For part of that time, he was assigned to work overseas in the East-Asia and Pacific region.

Sources say after being retired for 12 years, Ma met with at least five officers of China's Ministry of State Security in a Hong Kong hotel room, where he "disclosed a substantial amount of highly classified national defense information," including facts about the CIA's internal organization, methods for communicating covertly, and the identities of CIA officers and human assets.

According to court documents, after leaving the CIA, Ma got a job as a Chinese linguist in the FBI's Honolulu field office. Ma used his position and clearance copy or photographed classified documents related to guided missile and weapons systems and other U.S. secrets and passed the information to his Chinese handler.

Ma was caught after an undercover Federal Bureau of Investigation agent posed as a representative of the Chinese government.

A video recording provided by the undercover agent showed Ma counting $2,000 in cash to acknowledge his work on behalf of China.

Investigators said Ma, who was born in Hong Kong, explained that he "wanted 'the motherland' to succeed" and admitted that he provided classified information to the Ministry of State Security and continued to work with some of its same representatives who were at the 2001 meeting.

Last year, another former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was sentenced to 19 years in prison after pleading guilty to conspiring with Chinese intelligence agents in 201,0 after leaving the agency.