Veteran national security reporter Bill Gertz offers a piece at freebeacon.com on the former CIA officer arrested for mishandling classified material.
A former CIA operations officer has been charged with mishandling secret information about recruited CIA agents, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.
The former case officer, Jerry Chun Shing Lee, also known as Zhen Cheng Li, was arrested by FBI agents at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport on Monday as he returned from his residence in Hong Kong, the department said in a statement.
Court documents in the case indicate Lee was under FBI counterintelligence surveillance since 2012, when agents secretly searched his Honolulu hotel room and found two books containing secrets about recruited CIA "assets."
Lee, 53, is a naturalized U.S. citizen living in Hong Kong. He served in the Army from 1982 to 1986 and graduated from Hawaii Pacific University in 1992.
He joined CIA in 1994 and according to FBI Special Agent Kellie R. O'Brien, was trained in "methods of covert communications, surveillance detection, recruitment of assets, handling of assets, payment of assets, operational security, and documenting, handling and securing classified information." O'Brien was the FBI counterspy who wrote the criminal complaint filed in federal court Jan. 13 and unsealed Tuesday.
Lee also held a top-secret security clearance and had access to sensitive compartmented information—secret information used to protect intelligence programs.
In August 2012, Lee moved from Hong Kong to northern Virginia and during a layover of several days in Honolulu FBI agents conducted a search of his hotel room and photographed two small books, a datebook, and an address book.
"The photographs of the books were reviewed by a CIA classification authority who determined that the books contained classified information," the FBI criminal complaint said.
The 49-page datebook "contained handwritten information pertaining to, but not limited to, operational notes from asset meetings, operational meeting locations, operational phone numbers, true names of assets, and covert facilities," the complaint stated.
The address book also held the true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees, as well as the addresses of CIA facilities.
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