Federal authorities have charged a former CIA officer with selling U.S. government secrets to China.
Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 67, who had also worked for the FBI as a translator, was arrested Friday, Aug. 14, 2020, and charged with espionage the following Monday. A naturalized U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong, Ma served in the CIA from 1982 to 1989 as an overseas officer, and took a job in 2004 at the FBI’s Hawaii field office as a Chinese document translator.
Ma allegedly began spying for China in 2001, and took the FBI job to get access to classified information. He was paid by China to spy, but told an FBI agent posing as a Chinese agent that he wanted to “the motherland to succeed,” according to CNN, which described the CIA secrets he compromised as “information about the CIA’s personnel and tradecraft.”