Ex-CIA agent living on Oahu accused of spying for China

A former CIA officer who lives in Honolulu was arrested Friday on a charge that he conspired with a relative — who also was a former CIA officer — to communicate classified information up to the Top Secret level to intelligence officials of the People’s Republic of China, the Justice Department said Monday.

Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 67, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Hong Kong, will make his initial appearance before a federal judge today in U.S. District Court in Honolulu.

On Aug. 12, during a meeting with an FBI undercover employee before his arrest, Ma accepted money for his espionage activities, “expressed his willingness to continue to help the Chinese government, and stated that he wanted ‘the motherland’ to succeed,” according to a Justice Department release.

Hawaii, with its large number of high-ranking military commands and vast National Security Agency effort, is well-known to be a hotbed of spying. Edward Snowden worked as a contractor at the NSA’s Kunia “tunnels” and around 2012 and 2013 allegedly stole hundreds of thousands of secret documents — eventually making some of them public.

But China is accused of espionage on an industrial scale.

FBI Director Christopher Wray last month called China’s spying the “greatest long-term threat to our nation’s information and intellectual property.”

“If you are an American adult, it is more likely than not that China has stolen your personal data,” Wray said, noting that in 2017 the Chinese military conspired to hack Equifax and obtained sensitive personal information on 150 million Americans.

Of nearly 5,000 active FBI counterintelligence cases underway across the country, almost half are related to China, Wray said.

Ma, a one-time University of Hawaii student, is charged with conspiracy to communicate national defense information to aid a foreign government and faces a maximum penalty of life imprisonment if convicted, officials said.

An affidavit filed by FBI Special Agent Chris Jensen lays out a case not of a master spy cleverly hiding in the shadows, but of family affair espionage involving an 85-year-old relative in California involving rudimentary methods.

A Chinese intelligence officer was “direct and open about his affiliation with the Chinese government” in approaching Ma, the report said.

According to the affidavit, U.S. authorities have video of a series of 2001 meetings between the pair and Chinese intelligence agents in a Hong Kong hotel room during which “highly classified” U.S. national defense information was revealed and Ma and his relative were paid $50,000.

The presence of the video means that U.S. agents either obtained it in 2001 and have known that Ma and his relative were allegedly spying all along, or the video was somehow obtained after 2001.

The affidavit also notes that a month after Ma became an FBI linguist in Honolulu in August 2004 he was stealing information, and on multiple dates through 2010 he was using a camera and digital storage device at his FBI workplace.

U.S. officials somehow knew that in 2006, Ma “possessed at his residence” a digital memory card with the pictures of five individuals China suspected as being informants, the affidavit said.

They also reported knowing that on Aug. 10, 2004, one day before reporting to work with the FBI, Ma phoned a suspected accomplice and stated he would be working for “the other side.”

That same year in September, while working in a secure FBI workspace, Ma used his FBI computer to create a CD with digital images of documents related to guided missile and weapons systems technology, according to officials.

The unidentified 85-year-old, called “coconspirator #1,” is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Shanghai who joined the CIA in 1967 and for years was assigned overseas.

In 1983, coconspirator #1 resigned from the CIA after inappropriately assisting Chinese nationals in getting in the United States and in 1998 was convicted of making false statements to a lending institution, according to the affidavit.

The individual now has “advanced and debilitating cognitive disease” and an arrest warrant is not being sought, the report said.

Ma and his relative “conspired with each other and multiple PRC intelligence officials to communicate classified national defense information over the course of a decade,” the Justice Department said in the release.

Over six years in Honolulu, Ma reportedly copied, photographed and stole documents that displayed U.S. classification markings such as “SECRET.”

“Ma took some of the stolen documents and images with him on his frequent trips to China with the intent to provide them to his handlers. Ma often returned from China with thousands of dollars in cash and expensive gifts, such as a new set of golf clubs,” according to the Justice Department.

Ma began working for the CIA in 1982. He left the agency in 1989 and lived and worked in Shanghai before coming to Hawaii.

When he arrived in Honolulu in 2000, he told Customs agents he had been an “importer and exporter” for the previous five years. Both Ma and coconspirator #1 worked during their CIA careers in the East Asia and Pacific regions.

The charges announced Monday “are a sobering reminder to our communities in Hawaii of the constant threat posed by those who seek to jeopardize our nation’s security through acts of espionage,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Hawaii Kenji M. Price said in the release.

“This case demonstrates the persistence of Chinese espionage efforts,” The Los Angeles Times quoted John Demers, the assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s national security division, as saying. “It shows the willingness to betray one’s adopted country and colleagues … And it reads like a spy novel.”

Eli Miranda, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Honolulu Division, noted that, “These cases are very complicated and take years if not decades to bring to a conclusion.”

According to the Justice Department, in spring 2019, over the course of two in-person meetings, Ma confirmed his espionage activities to an FBI undercover employee Ma believed was a representative of the PRC intelligence service, and accepted $2,000 in cash as a “small token” of appreciation for Ma’s assistance to China.

Affidavit in espionage case against Alexander Yuk Ching Ma by Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Scribd