A former C.I.A. officer and contract translator for the F.B.I. who accepted thousands of dollars in cash and expensive gifts, such as a new set of golf clubs, in return for providing classified information to the Chinese government was sentenced on Wednesday to 10 years in prison, prosecutors said.
The security breach included confirming the identity of several people that Chinese intelligence officials were interested in and providing what federal authorities said was a large amount of information related to national defense.
The former officer, Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 71, of Honolulu, was arrested and charged in August 2020 after he admitted to an undercover F.BI. employee, who had hired him as part of a ruse to investigate him, that he had used his security clearance to help get the protected information to the Shanghai State Security Bureau of the People’s Republic of China, the U.S. Department of Justice said in a statement on Wednesday.
Mr. Ma admitted his involvement as part of an agreement with prosecutors under which he pleaded guilty in May to conspiring to gather and deliver national defense information.
“I take full responsibility for my crime,” he wrote in a letter to the judge ahead of his sentencing. “No matter what made me do it. It was wrong for me to have done it.”
According to court documents, Mr. Ma, who held a “top secret” security clearance and had access to classified national defense information, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency from 1982 until 1989.
A criminal complaint spelling out the charges stated that Mr. Ma and an unnamed older relative, whom he later said was his brother, was also working for the C.I.A. and held a security clearance. The relative, who had a debilitating cognitive disease when the charges were filed, first provided information to Chinese intelligence officials in March 2001 about C.I.A. personnel, foreign informants, classified operations, cryptography and other methods of concealing communications, secrets for which they were paid $50,000, the complaint stated.
The relative worked for the agency from 1967 until 1983.
In his plea agreement, Mr. Ma admitted that in March 2001 and for over a decade after he resigned from the C.I.A. in 1989, he was contacted by agents from the Shanghai State Security Bureau, who asked him to arrange a meeting between his relative and the Chinese agency.
In March 2003, Mr. Ma applied for a job as a contract linguist with the Honolulu field office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The F.B.I., which was aware of his connections to China’s intelligence agency, hired him “to monitor and investigate his activities and contacts,” according to prosecutors.
Mr. Ma worked as a part-time employee at an off-site location for the F.B.I. from August 2004 until October 2012, prosecutors said.
For more than six years, Mr. Ma, who often traveled to China and returned with thousands of dollars in cash and expensive gifts, “regularly copied, photographed and stole documents that displayed U.S. classification markings such as ‘SECRET,’” prosecutors said, “with the intent to provide them to his handlers.”
Before his arrest by the F.B.I. in 2020, Mr. Ma, a native of Hong Kong, said that he wanted “the motherland” to succeed, prosecutors said. The relative he worked with, who was born in Shanghai, is now deceased.
A lawyer for Mr. Ma did not immediately respond to inquiries on Thursday.
Under the terms of his plea agreement, Mr. Ma, who had faced up to life in prison, must cooperate with the U.S. government for the rest of his life, including by submitting to debriefings by U.S. government agencies, prosecutors said.
After he serves his prison sentence, Mr. Ma will be subject to five years of supervised release. He is being held at the Federal Detention Center in Honolulu.
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