The authorities arrested a former CIA officer at a US airport on Monday night in connection with allegations he kept classified information without backing from the US State Department, the State Department said on Tuesday.
Jerry Chun Cheng Li, an American who now lives in Hong Kong, used to keep very secret information and began working for the CIA in 1994.
The Department of Justice said that in 2012, FBI officers searched his places on two trips to Virginia and Hawaii and found two small books containing handwritten information on details such as real names and numbers of recruits to act as spies and C Secret CIA.
He was arrested by the authorities at John F. Kennedy Airport. Kennedy International in New York.
The case is seen by the US District Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. But I like Tuesday for the first time before a federal investigative judge in Brooklyn. He ordered Lee to be held without bail.
A federal defense lawyer, like Lee, declined to comment on Tuesday.
Lee, 53, worked in the US military from 1982 to 1986 and worked for the CIA from 1994 to 2007, according to a written testimony from an FBI officer.
The officer wrote in his testimony that Lee and his family left Hong Kong in August 2012 to travel to northern Virginia. During the trip, they stayed in hotels where the two books were found.
The two books were found in my bags.
The confidentiality of the handwritten information was different in the two books, but the officer said at least one page contained highly confidential information, “the disclosure of which could be very damaging to the national security of the United States.”
The officer also noted that Lee listed the secret cables he wrote during his work as an Army officer describing his dealings with CIA officers.
The FBI conducted five separate interviews with Lee in 2013 in which he did not reveal that he had the books. The Justice Department said he also met with former CIA colleagues at that time without returning the books to the government.