The FBI Hired China’s Spy to Keep Him Under Watch

When the FBI hired Alexander Yuk Ching Ma in 2004, it already knew about his ties to Chinese intelligence. Putting him on the payroll was part of the investigation. The former CIA officer would work part time at an off-site location in Honolulu, where the bureau could monitor his activities and contacts.

The arrangement lasted until October 2012. It is the detail that changes the reading of a case otherwise easily mistaken for a story about a spy passing undetected from one American agency to another. The government’s final account describes a deliberate ruse. It also describes a conspiracy that still consumed substantial investigative resources and ended in a ten-year sentence.

The transaction at its center had taken place in a Hong Kong hotel in March 2001. Ma arranged a meeting between officers of the Shanghai State Security Bureau and a relative who had also served in the CIA. Over three days, the relative supplied a large volume of classified information. The price was $50,000.

Part of that meeting was recorded. Prosecutors said the video showed Ma receiving and counting the money. The 2020 charging account described disclosures about CIA personnel, operations and concealed communications. Years after the men left government service, the secrets they remembered still had a buyer.

In 2006, Chinese officers gave Ma photographs of four people they wanted identified. He took the request to his former-CIA relative and obtained at least two identities. The Justice Department said at sentencing that those identities remained classified. The task illustrates what an intelligence service can want from a retired officer: the ability to put names to faces that remain protected years later.

The FBI eventually supplied Ma with another apparent Chinese contact. In meetings described in the charging documents, an undercover employee posed as a Chinese intelligence representative. Ma confirmed his past work and accepted $2,000 as a token of appreciation. He accepted more money in August 2020 and expressed willingness to keep helping China. His arrest followed.

Ma pleaded guilty in May 2024. The Associated Press’s courtroom account records him confirming the prosecutor’s description and acknowledging that his secrecy obligations survived his departure from the CIA. Judge Derrick Watson imposed ten years in prison that September, followed by five years of supervised release.

The agreement reaches beyond those dates. Ma must cooperate with American authorities for the rest of his life, including debriefings; the plea also provides for polygraph examinations. Prosecutors said he had already sat through multiple interviews. The man who helped arrange a sale of American secrets will spend his remaining years under an obligation to explain what he knows.