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A decade in prison for the former CIA agent who spied for China

2024-09-12 08:30:01, Kosova & Bota CNA

A former CIA employee and FBI language contractor who received lavish cash and gifts in exchange for spying for China was sentenced Wednesday to 10 years in prison.

Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 71, struck a deal with federal prosecutors in May, who agreed to recommend a 10-year prison sentence in exchange for pleading guilty to selling US secrets to a foreign government.

He was arrested in 2020. In a letter addressed to the judge before the sentence was announced, the defendant Ma wrote, among other things, that, "I hope that God and America will forgive me for what I have done." If the deal had not been reached, he would have faced the possibility of life in prison.

Alexander Yuk Ching Ma was born in Hong Kong and moved to Honolulu in 1968. He became a US citizen in 1975 and joined the CIA in 1982. A year later he was assigned to foreign service and in 1989 he resigned. According to court documents, he held a top-secret security clearance.

Ma lived and worked in Shanghai, China, before returning to Hawaii in 2001. At the request of Chinese intelligence, he agreed to arrange a meeting between Chinese agents and his older brother, who had also worked for the CIA - n.

According to court documents, during a three-day meeting at a hotel in Hong Kong, Mr Ma's brother gave Chinese agents a large amount of secret documents.

Prosecutors said they had video showing Mr. Ma counting the $50,000 payment. Two years later, Ma applied for a job as a language contractor with the FBI's Honolulu office. The Americans knew he was cooperating with Chinese agents and hired him in 2004 to closely monitor his espionage activities.

Over the next six years, he regularly stole classified documents, prosecutors said. On many occasions he took the documents with him on trips to China, returning with thousands of dollars and expensive gifts, prosecutors said.

In one case where a US intelligence official posed as an alleged Chinese agent, Ma accepted thousands of dollars in exchange for classified information from the past and told him he wanted to see the "motherland" succeed, according to US prosecutors.

"Let it be a message to anyone thinking of doing the same ," the FBI's Honolulu office chief, Steven Merrill, said in a statement after Mr. Ma's sentencing. "No matter how long it takes or how much time passes, you will be brought to justice."

His brother was never prosecuted after he died of Alzheimer's disease, court documents state./ VOA