Free Republic

A former C.I.A. officer suspected of helping China identify the agency’s informants in that country has been arrested, the Justice Department said on Tuesday. Many of the informants were killed in a systematic dismantling of the C.I.A.’s spy network in China starting in 2010 that was one of the American government’s worst intelligence failures in recent years, several former intelligence officials have said. The arrest of the former officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, capped an intense F.B.I. investigation that began around 2012 after the C.I.A. began losing its informants in China.... Mr. Lee, who left the C.I.A. in 2007...

Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, also known as Zhen Cheng, was arrested after arriving at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York. A naturalized U.S. citizen, he began working for the CIA as a case officer in 1994 and maintained a top-secret clearance, according to a Justice Department announcement. The department alleges that Mr. Lee and his family left Hong Kong to return to the U.S. While traveling back to the United States, Mr. Lee’s family stayed in hotels in Hawaii and Virginia, where FBI agents conducted court-authorized searches of Lee’s room and luggage, the Justice Department said.