Former CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee (shown) was sentenced Friday to 19 years in prison for conspiring to provide the Chinese government with American intelligence secrets.

Lee served with the CIA for 13 years, from 1994 to 2007. His sentencing came after pleading guilty back in May to a single charge of conspiracy to provide national defense information to a foreign government.

Lee’s primary mission as a case officer was recruiting clandestine human intelligence sources. He was arrested in January of 2018 after an FBI search of his hotel room found notebooks and a thumb drive containing names and phone numbers of covert CIA employees and informants, information about covert facilities, and details of a sensitive CIA operation.

By Lee’s own admission, he met with two Chinese intelligence officers in Shenzhen in 2010 who offered to pay him and “take care of him for life” if he gave them secrets he learned in his capacity as a CIA officer. Over the following months, the Chinese gave him at least 21 requests for intelligence secrets.

A month after the Shenzhen meeting, Lee deposited $17,000 into his bank account even though his consulting business was failing at the time. According to federal prosecutors, Lee never came up with a good explanation about where he received the money.

Prosecutors also told the Federal District Court judge that the Chinese gave Lee a total of $840,000, an amount far greater than what other spies have received. Kevin Mallory, a former CIA officer who was recently sentenced to 20 years in prison for disclosing secrets to China, was paid just $25,000 by the communist state.

But the defendant’s lawyer, Edward MacMahon, said the government has never linked the deposits Lee made to Chinese intelligence.

“It's speculation that this money was for the crown jewels of American intelligence,” MacMahon conceded to Judge T.S. Ellis.

Prosecutor Neil Hammerstrom acknowledged that the intelligence community can never know with certainty how much information Lee disclosed to the Chinese, saying only that “it is all but certain” that he sold sensitive secrets that endangered the lives of intelligence sources and hindered the CIA’s intelligence-gathering efforts in China.

“Had the government ever possessed proof that Mr. Lee gave any classified information to the Chinese, it certainly would have charged him with the actual transmission of national defense information,” said MacMahon in court filings. Lee never made any admission to that effect.

MacMahon added that the government told Lee’s lawyers a damage assessment was never carried out by the intelligence community.

“The government has posited no direct evidence that Mr. Lee actually caused any harm to the United States,” MacMahon said.

The prosecutor, however, asserted that “The only logical conclusion” is that Chinese intelligence “must have been getting top-drawer, high quality (information) from this defendant.”

Judge Ellis concluded that it was “more likely than not that at least some portion of the money came from the Chinese, so he must have given them something of value.”

“Everything he knew would have been highly valuable to the PRC,” said prosecutor Adam Small.

Defense lawyer Nina Ginsberg countered that there’s no evidence the sources identified in Lee’s notebook were harmed or compromised.

“I dare to say the government would certainly know if their agents had been exposed,” Ginsberg said.

Small responded: “Whether something has or has not occurred is in some ways irrelevant."

Some current and past U.S. intelligence officials said Lee’s agreement with the Chinese in 2010 came at the same time the CIA’s covert communication system was compromised. As a result, they say, it’s impossible to know whether the most damage came from Lee or the system failure.

Frank Figliuzzi, a former FBI counterintelligence official now working for NBC News, called Lee’s case “a horrific loss for the intelligence community, and it's not a loss than can be recovered from easily.”

Prosecutors originally sought a sentence of more than 20 years for the former CIA case officer. Lee, a naturalized American citizen who immigrated to Hawaii from Hong Kong at age 15, apologized for his actions.

“I take full responsibility for my conduct,” he said.

Lee is the third CIA officer in less than a year to be sentenced for conspiring with China. Kevin Mallory was sentenced in May, while former U.S. intelligence officer Ron Rockwell Hansen was sentenced to 10 years in prison in September.

Luis Miguel is a writer whose journalistic endeavors shed light on the Deep State, the immigration crisis, and the enemies of freedom. Follow his exploits on Facebook, Twitter, Bitchute, and at luisantoniomiguel.com.