Ex-CIA officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee held ‘for spying for China’ (Source bbc.com) A former CIA officer has been arrested in the US on charges of retaining classified information in a case thought to be linked to the crippling of the agency’s spy operation in China. Jerry Chun Shing Lee, a naturalised US citizen, was held at New York’s JFK airport on Monday, the US justice department said. He worked for the CIA between 1994 and 2007, when he left for Hong Kong. In 2012 the FBI began investigating the disappearance of CIA agents in China. In the two years before, some 20 informants had been killed or jailed – one of the most disastrous failures of US intelligence in recent years. The FBI’s investigation into why the US was losing so many informants in China was by this point in full swing. FBI agents searched his hotel rooms in Hawaii and Virginia and found two small books with secret records, the US justice department says. They contained handwritten notes on details such as “true names and phone numbers of assets and covert CIA employees”. Mr Lee left the US in 2013 after being questioned on five occasions by FBI agents. He never mentioned his possession of the books containing classified information, say the court documents. He has only now been detained while on another visit. It’s unclear whether he knew he was still under suspicion. The justice department says that Mr Lee, 53, has been charged “with unlawful retention of national defence information and faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, if convicted”.