Forget ex-CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee: fears over Chinese spies are overblown
The excitement over the ex-CIA officer accused of spying for China hides a less glamorous truth – that most of Beijing’s ‘foreign agents’ are engaged in work that is banal, costly … and largely pointless
Whatever the truth surrounding the case of Jerry Chun Shing Lee, the ex-CIA officer arrested by US authorities last week and accused of having spied for China, we can be sure of one thing: he was quite unlike the agents typically used by the Chinese Ministry of State Security (MMS).
If the allegations against him are true, then Lee was unusual in that he was actually useful to his handlers – unlike the vast majority of the MSS’s foreign agents.
Lee was stopped after flying into John F. Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong and arrested on a single count of illegally possessing classified information – the real names and contact details of covert CIA sources, the locations of covert facilities and meeting locations. If that wasn’t enough (he faces 10 years in prison if found guilty), media reports have speculated his case is linked to one of the US government’s most serious intelligence failures of recent years – a years-long espionage operation by Beijing that led to the death or imprisonment of 18 CIA informants.
That would put him in a completely different league to the large corps of agents – American and other nationalities – in China who are on the MSS payroll (at great expense), yet whose work is so insignificant many do not even realise they are committing crimes that could earn them life sentences in their home countries.
Usually, these agents don’t get caught, but occasionally they do, and the curtain is lifted ever so briefly on a world far less sophisticated – and certainly less glamorous – than the average drug store espionage novel.
