Former CIA officer pleads guilty to spying for China, DOJ says

A former CIA officer pleaded guilty Friday to providing national defense information to the People’s Republic of China, the Justice Department said.

A former CIA officer targeted in an FBI undercover operation pleaded guilty Friday to providing national defense information to the People’s Republic of China, the Justice Department said. Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 71, of Honolulu, who served as a CIA officer over a seven-year period in the 1980s, worked with an unnamed co-conspirator in 2001 to provide Chinese intelligence “with a large volume of classified U.S. national defense information” in exchange for tens of thousands of dollars, DOJ said, citing the plea agreement. CNN has reached out to attorneys for Ma for comment on the guilty plea. Ma later applied as a linguist with the FBI’s Honolulu Field Office, where he served from 2004 to 2012. “The FBI, aware of Ma’s ties to PRC (People’s Republic of China) intelligence, hired Ma, as part of an investigative plan, to work at an off-site location where his activities could be monitored and his contacts with the PRC investigated,” according to the DOJ release. As CNN previously reported, during the course of his monitored employment with the FBI, Ma allegedly took a digital camera into the FBI office to photograph sensitive documents that he would then take to his handlers in China.