A former CIA officer who was charged Tuesday with unlawful possession of secrets is suspected of a much worse crime: betraying U.S. informants in China, sources familiar with the case told NBC News.
The former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, was arrested Monday after flying into New York on a Cathay Pacific flight from his home in Hong King, federal authorities announced.
Lee, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen, was charged with a single count of unlawfully possessing national defense information, based on a 2012 search that found him to be in possession of two notebooks containing the true names of CIA assets and covert facilities, which are some of the agency's most closely guarded secrets.
But sources familiar with the case say he is suspected of funneling information to China that caused the deaths or imprisonment of approximately 20 American agents, in one of the worst intelligence breaches in decades.
The New York Times
reported last year that the Chinese government systematically dismantled CIA spying operations in the country starting in 2010,
killing or imprisoning more than a dozen sources over two years and crippling intelligence gathering there for years afterward.
CIA and FBI officials were mystified and mortified as one after another of their best agents in China were jailed or executed.
It was considered the worst intelligence catastrophe since the 1990s, when Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen, formerly of the CIA and the FBI, provided secrets to Moscow for years that led to the deaths of multiple agents. Both men are serving life terms in federal prison.
The Times story described a debate over a suspected mole, a former CIA case officer now living in an Asian country.
An FBI task force launched an investigation and began to focus on Lee, sources tell NBC News. It's unclear how the FBI lured Lee back to the U.S. but officials say there have been several undercover attempts to incriminate him, and at least one confrontational interview during which he denied being a spy.
In 2012, one source said, the FBI lured Lee back to the U.S. with a phony job offer, but no charges were filed and he returned to Hong Kong.
