The former CIA agent, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, admits to having spied for China

A former CIA agent pled guilty to espionage on behalf of China, announced the US Department of Justice, in a case allegedly related to the dismantling of a US spy ring. .

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 54, left the CIA in 2007 to live in Hong Kong, where he was recruited by Chinese agents.

Prosecutors said the naturalized US citizen was later paid to divulge information on US secret assets.

This led China to destroy a network of informants between 2010 and 2012.

Twenty or so informants were killed or imprisoned during this period, one of the most disastrous failures of American intelligence in recent years.

United States Deputy Attorney General for National Security, John Demers, said Lee's case was the third concerning US agents and China in less than a year.

"Each of these cases is a tragic betrayal of the country and its colleagues," he said.

What did Lee do?

Lee, who was working for the CIA between 1994 and 2007, pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide information on national defense to help a foreign government in a Virginia court on Wednesday, the Justice Ministry announced. in a statement.

Lee was contacted by Chinese intelligence agents in 2010. They offered him money by promising to take him "for life" in exchange for the secret information required. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were deposited in his bank account in Hong Kong between May 2010 and December 2013.

Mr. Lee created a document containing information on CIA activities, including where US agents would be posted.

In 2012, FBI agents searched a hotel room in Hawaii registered in Mr. Lee's name and found a USB key. The investigators found the document on the unallocated space in the drive, suggesting that it had been removed.

The research also revealed that Lee had an agenda and an address book containing intelligence notes provided by CIA agents, their true identity, their operational meeting locations and their locations. phone numbers, as well as information on secret installations.

Lee was interrogated by CIA officers in 2012 during which he said he had met with Chinese intelligence officers, while concealing the fact that they had given him tasks, said the Justice Ministry. In 2013, he first denied having read the document on his USB drive and then confessed to having created it, while claiming that he had never forwarded it to Chinese agents .

Mr. Lee was arrested at JFK Airport in New York in January 2018. He will be sentenced in August.

CIA spying operation in China: key dates

• 2010: Information gathered by the US from internal sources in the Chinese government bureaucracy is starting to dry up
• 2011: The informants are starting to disappear. It's unclear whether the CIA was hacked or whether a mole helped the Chinese to identify agents
• 2012: The FBI begins the investigation
• May 2014: Five Chinese army officers are accused of stealing trade secrets and internal documents from US companies. Later that same month, China says that it is a main target for American spies
• 2015: The CIA withdraws its staff from the US embassy in Beijing, fearing that stolen data on government computers will unveil its agents
• April 2017: Beijing offers big cash rewards for its information on foreign spies
• May 2017: Four former CIA officials told the New York Times that up to 20 CIA informants had been killed or jailed by the Chinese between 2010 and 2012
• June 2017: Former US diplomatic officer Kevin Mallory is arrested and charged with giving top secret documents to a Chinese agent
• January 2018: Former CIA officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, arrested