Ex-CIA officer who spied for China could go to prison — and spend life on polygraph tests

HONOLULU (AP) — A former CIA officer and FBI contract linguist who received cash, golf clubs and other expensive gifts in exchange for spying for China could face up to a decade in prison if a U.S. judge approves his plea deal Wednesday.

Alexander Yuk Ching Ma, 71, reached a deal in May with federal prosecutors who agreed to recommend a 10-year sentence in exchange for pleading guilty to conspiring to gather or furnish national defense information to a foreign government. The deal also requires him to undergo polygraph tests whenever the U.S. government requests them for the rest of his life.

“I hope God and America will forgive me for what I have done,” Ma, who has been in custody since his 2020 arrest, wrote in a letter to Chief U.S. District Judge Derrick Watson in Honolulu before the sentencing.

Without the deal, Ma faced life in prison. He has the right to get out of the deal if Watson rejects the 10-year sentence.

Ma was born in Hong Kong, moved to Honolulu in 1968 and became a U.S. citizen in 1975. He joined the CIA in 1982, was assigned overseas the next year and resigned in 1989. He held the highest secret security clearance, according to court documents.

Ma lived and worked in Shanghai, China, before returning to Hawaii in 2001. At the request of Chinese intelligence officials, he agreed to arrange a meeting between Shanghai State Security Bureau officers and his older brother, who was also a CIA case officer.

During a three-day meeting in a Hong Kong hotel room this year, Ma’s brother — identified in a guilty plea agreement as “Co-Conspirator No. 1” — provided intelligence officials with “a large amount of secret and confidential information,” according to the document. They were paid $50,000; prosecutors said they had an hour-long video recording of the meeting, showing Ma counting the money.

Two years later, Ma applied for a job as a contract linguist at the FBI’s Honolulu field office. By then, the Americans knew he was working with Chinese intelligence officers and hired him in 2004 to monitor his espionage activities.

For the next six years, he regularly copied, photographed and stole secret documents, prosecutors said. He often took them on trips to China, returning with thousands of dollars in cash and expensive gifts, including a new set of golf clubs, prosecutors said.

At one point in 2006, his superiors at the Shanghai State Security Bureau asked Ma to ask his brother to help identify four people in photographs. His brother managed to identify two of them.

During the special operation, Ma accepted thousands of dollars in cash in exchange for past espionage activities and told an undercover FBI agent posing as a Chinese intelligence officer that he wanted to see “the motherland” succeed, prosecutors said.

The brother was never charged. He suffered from debilitating symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease and has since died, court documents say.

“Because of my brother, I couldn’t bring myself to report the crime,” Ma said in a letter to the judge. “He was like a father to me. In a way, I’m glad he left this world because it allowed me to admit what I did.”

The plea agreement required Ma to cooperate with the U.S. government by providing more information about his case and submitting to polygraph examinations for the rest of his life.

Prosecutors said that since pleading guilty, Ma has taken part in five “lengthy and sometimes grueling sessions over four weeks, some lasting as long as six hours, during which he provided valuable information and tried to answer the government’s questions as best he could.”