Former CIA Officer Sentenced to 19 Years for Conspiring With Chinese Spies

“Chinese spies are being found out, abroad and in the United States, in surprising numbers. That means there are even more of them out and about, of course. But for the Chinese, it raises the question of how many we knew about before, and how many we fed bogus information to.”

A former CIA case officer was sentenced Friday to 19 years in prison for conspiring to provide American intelligence secrets to the Chinese government, in an espionage case that some current and former officials say dealt a devastating blow to U.S. intelligence operations.

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, served 13 years as a Central Intelligence Agency case officer in several locations overseas, including China, where prosecutors said he had firsthand knowledge of some of the agency’s most sensitive secrets, including the names of covert CIA officers and clandestine human sources in China.