The justice department alleges Ron Rockwell Hansen was carrying classified information when he was taken into custody on Saturday while on his way to board a flight to China.
It is the latest in a series of arrests of American officials on charges of spying for Beijing. Hansen, from Syracuse, Utah, the charges said, had retired from the US army where he worked in signals intelligence.
Fluent in Mandarin and Russian, he was recruited in 2006 to work for the DIA as a case officer, someone who recruits and manages foreign agents.
Based in a commercial office in Beijing, Hansen made contact with Chinese intelligence and over several years tried to pitch himself to the DIA and FBI as a double agent who would act ultimately for the US, the indictment alleged.
Investigators said he had regular meetings with Chinese intelligence agents that he never reported, used cellphones provided to him by Chinese sources, and retained classified information to which he was not supposed to have access.
They said Hansen was in deep financial trouble between 2013 and 2016, with debts of several hundred thousand dollars. During and after that time he received more than $800,000 from China, often cash that he carried to the US, that he could not explain.
By early this year it was alleged the FBI had found Hansen was seeking from American colleagues information on the US position on North and South Korea, as well as its military operations planned against China, to be sold to his Chinese contacts.
John Demers, the assistant attorney general for national security, said: “His alleged actions are a betrayal of our nation’s security and the American people and are an affront to his former intelligence community colleagues.”
In January the former CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee was arrested on charges that he sold information to China. He is reportedly suspected of having provided information on the CIA’s network of informants that was brought down by the Chinese between 2010 and 2012.
Former state department official Kevin Mallory was arrested last year for spying for China. And another US diplomat, Candace Marie Claiborne, was arrested for taking money from Chinese intelligence officials, though she was not directly accused of supplying information in exchange.
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