A former Central Intelligence Agency officer has been sentenced to 10 years in prison, followed by five years of supervised release, for spying to gather and deliver U.S. defense information to China.
Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 71, of Honolulu, was arrested in August 2020 after admitting to an undercover FBI agent that he sold classified information to intelligence officers employed by the Chinese government's Shanghai State Security Bureau.
Ma was convicted of years-long conspiracy to commit espionage, a serious breach of national security that caused the government to expend substantial investigative resources.
According to court documents, Ma worked for the CIA from 1982 until 1989. His relative, who is a co-conspirator in the case, also worked for the CIA from 1967 until 1983. As CIA officers, both of them held Top Secret security clearances that granted them access to sensitive and classified CIA information.
As Ma admitted in the plea agreement, in March 2001, over a decade after he resigned from the CIA, Ma met with SSSB intelligence officers in a Hong Kong hotel room, where a large volume of classified U.S. national defense information was passed on to the Chinese in return for $50,000 in cash.
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