A former CIA case officer was sentenced Friday to 19 years in prison for conspiring to provide American intelligence secrets to the Chinese government, in an espionage case that some current and former officials say dealt a devastating blow to U.S. intelligence operations, NBC News reported.
Jerry Chun Shing Lee, 55, served 13 years as a Central Intelligence Agency case officer in several locations overseas, including China, where prosecutors said he had firsthand knowledge of some of the agency's most sensitive secrets, including the names of covert CIA officers and clandestine human sources in China.
But many aspects of the case remain a mystery. Lee was never charged with actually giving any secrets to the Chinese. While the Justice Department told a federal judge "it is all but certain" he did so, his lawyer said, "the government has offered only conjecture as a basis for these claims."
