Larry Downing/Reuters
The Justice Department on Tuesday indicted a former CIA operative who allegedly passed on information to Beijing that allowed Chinese spies to kill U.S. informants and largely cripple American intelligence operations there. In a statement announcing the charges, the Justice Department said Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 53, sold Chinese intelligence officers information “relating to the national defense of the United States.” Lee, who worked for the CIA from 1994 to 2007 before moving to Hong Kong, was lured back to the U.S. by the FBI in 2012 as part of a long-running operation. He was first arrested in January on charges of illegally retaining classified information, but federal prosecutors on Tuesday added a new charge of conspiring to commit espionage for a foreign government. Lee is believed to have been the mole behind a series of killings of U.S. informants in China that crippled the CIA network in the country.