Chinese-American held for spying
Suspect is a Republican activist
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U.S. Attorney Debra W. Yang, with FBI agent Leslie Wiser Jr., at a news conference to announce the arrest of a former FBI special agent.
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LOS ANGELES, California (Reuters) -- A Chinese-American woman helping U.S. government agents as "an asset" on China allegedly stole classified documents from an FBI agent who was both her contact and her lover and sent them to China, prosecutors said on Wednesday.
Katrina Leung, 49, was arrested along with her lover, retired FBI Agent James J. Smith, 59. She was charged with obtaining documents related to national defense for the advantage of a foreign nation.
Smith, a 30-year FBI veteran of the foreign counter-intelligence squad who retired in 2000, is charged with allowing access to classified information through gross negligence.
Affidavits unsealed by a federal magistrate in Los Angeles on Wednesday showed that Leung was paid from 1983 to 2002 as a U.S. government "asset" providing information about China to the FBI.
Smith was Leung's principal FBI handler and prosecutors said he would go to her house with classified documents and when his back was turned she would make copies of them.
Leung was arrested on Wednesday morning without incident at her home in the posh Los Angeles suburb of San Marino by FBI agents, prosecutors said.
She and Smith had a "long-term affair" that began when they began working together for the FBI, prosecutors said.
The basis for the charge against Leung was a June 12, 1997 document relating to the investigation of a man who pleaded guilty to passing secret information to China, the criminal complaint stated.
Leung also admitted to having a "long-term sexual relationship" with another FBI agent based in San Francisco, according to court documents.
That agent, whose name was not disclosed in court documents, told the FBI that he obtained a tape of Leung speaking with a Chinese intelligence agent in 1991 -- a conversation in which she apparently was acting on her own.
According to court documents, the San Francisco agent told Smith about the taped conversation, and was told that the problem had been addressed.
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