The news of an ex-CIA spy getting arrested and charged for espionage this afternoon isn’t going to set well with all those Democrats who think China is awesome.

Developing: Former CIA officer charged with espionage + accused of conspiring 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 (PRC). Assistant AG for…

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) August 17, 2020

National Securiry Division John Demers tells @CBSNews “Most Americans will not betray their country when they're approached by Chinese intelligence officers..that Chinese intelligence operation has to start much, much more broadly in order to get down to..people who are willing”

— Catherine Herridge (@CBS_Herridge) August 17, 2020

Per Pete Williams at NBC, we find out more.

“A 15-year veteran of the CIA was charged Monday with selling U.S. secrets to China then unwittingly admitting his spying to the FBI.

The method prosecutors said they used to get him to reveal the nature of his espionage was worthy of a spy novel itself.

Court documents said 67-year-old Alexander Yuk Ching Ma of Honolulu was charged with violating U.S. espionage laws. Prosecutors said he joined the CIA in 1967 then served as a CIA officer until he retired from the agency in 1989. For part of that time he was assigned to work overseas in the East-Asia and Pacific region.

Twelve years after he retired, prosecutors said Monday that Ma met with at least five officers of China’s Ministry of State Security in a Hong Kong hotel room, where he “disclosed a substantial amount of highly classified national defense information,” including facts about the CIA’s internal organization, methods for communicating covertly, and the identities of CIA officers and human assets.”

After Ma retired from the CIA, he went to work for the FBI as a linguist. How long did he work against our country? SIX YEARS.

“Ma kept in touch with his Chinese contacts as he applied for an FBI position in 2004. Over the next six years, Ma allegedly downloaded, collected or otherwise photographed sensitive information to pass along to China until he stopped work for the FBI in 2010.”

I have questions.

A. No one at that FBI office in those six years ever noticed something was wrong?

B. Not a single person in that FBI office didn’t pick up on or realize that the Chinese were somehow ahead of the game?

C. It took until 2019, after he retired, for the FBI to realize MA was up to no good??

Quite honestly, I want to know why the FBI was asleep at the wheel!

How many intelligence assets were exposed and endangered by MA’s espionage? How much intelligence that could’ve helped the US deal with China better was lost because of MA’s turning traitor?

We do know that another ex-CIA agent engaged in espionage and in fact not only put Chinese informants in danger, some were killed because of his work.

Nineteen years in prison seems a pretty paltry sentence when compared to the intelligence lost and people killed because of Jerry’s work. 

In addition to MA and Jerry, our intelligence community has uncovered a major spy problem over these last few months. How many college professors are now under arrest for selling and carrying secrets to China? 

We have professors out of Harvard, Arkansas, and Emory University to name a few. Let’s not forget about Diane Feinstein’s Chinese chauffeur. 

We have a China problem. And I’m not talking about just the Wuhan pandemic that was unleashed on the world. No, I’m talking about the overt and covert espionage that China has been engaged in against the United States for YEARS. It’s a well known fact in business circles that China will turn back flips to steal any and every shred of intellectual property from a US business. Yet for too long, too many businesses have stuck with China, even as they watched company trade secrets show up on the market under another company’s name. 

As the esteemed blog father Glenn Reynolds has been saying for months now, China is asshole. 

This arrest of an ex-CIA agent, who’d been handing major Top Secret information to China for SIX years, is another prime example showing that China absolutely CANNOT and SHOULD NOT be trusted. Ever. 

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Feature Photo Credit: Tomas Roggero via Flickr, cropped and modified