Former CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee for secrets found in a book, ties to China and possible leaks

A former CIA officer has been arrested for keeping details of US agents, safe houses and other secrets years after retiring from the agency and moving to Hong Kong.

The former intelligence officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, was detained at JFK airport on Monday, more than five years after FBI agents discovered he had kept a small address book and pocket calendar containing secret operational notes from his time at the CIA, about “asset meetings, operational meeting locations, operational phone numbers, true names of assets and covert facilities.”

The court documents chronicle this national security disaster back through the Obama administration.

Lee, a 53 year-old naturalized US citizen who left the CIA in 2007, made an initial appearance in a New York federal court on Tuesday. He was charged with the unlawful retention of national defenze information. He is due to appear at another court in northern Virginia, where the CIA is located.

The New York Times and the Washington Post reported that Lee is suspected of leaking the names of US agents to the Chinese authorities, in one of the deadliest intelligence setbacks for the CIA since the cold war.

Between 2010 and 2012, the Chinese killed or imprisoned more than a dozen US sources in China, the New York Times reported last year.

Officials did not say why it took so long to bring charges against Lee, or whether he had leaked any materials to foreign countries. Former intelligence officials told the New York Times that the FBI managed to persuade Lee to travel to the US under a false pretext, and interviewed several times in 2013.

A CIA spokesman declined to comment on the case on Tuesday, citing Lee’s ongoing prosecution.

Chinese flag, Beijing, China. 2009 Photo/Daderot