A former CIA officer sold top secret and other classified documents to Chinese intelligence officials, according to charges filed Thursday in Alexandria federal court.

Kevin Patrick Mallory, 60, of Leesburg, Va., was arrested Thursday and appeared briefly in front of Judge Theresa Buchanan on counts of delivering defense information to aid a foreign government and making false statements. He asked to be represented by a public defender.

Mallory had a top secret security clearance until he left the government in 2012, prosecutors say, having worked at various government agencies and defense contractors.

Although the primary government agency in question is not named, two government officials confirm that Mallory worked for the CIA.

Prosecutors say Mallory sent three documents containing classified information, one of which was labeled top secret, to a Chinese intelligence operative in May.

“Your object is to gain information, and my object is to be paid for it,” Mallory wrote to the Chinese contact at around the same time, according to an affidavit from FBI agent Stephen Green filed in federal court. Mallory allegedly added that he would “bring the remainder of the documents” on a June trip.

“My current object is to make sure your security (sic) and try to reimburse you,” the operative allegedly replied.

The CIA declined to comment Thursday.

According to the affidavit, Mallory told FBI agents in May that he had been contacted in February on a social media site by a recruiter for a Chinese think tank, the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. He spoke on the phone with the recruiter and was then introduced to a potential client, whom he traveled to Shanghai to meet in both March and April.

In March, Mallory allegedly reached out to several former CIA coworkers and asked for help getting in touch with a specific department. He told one employee that he believed the people he had met with were working for Chinese intelligence, according to Green. He allegedly also said he had been given a device to communicate securely with the Chinese agent and been taught how to use it.

Expecting to meet with the same CIA employee in May, Mallory was instead greeted by FBI agents. He let them search the device given to him by the Chinese operative. But, according to Green’s affidavit, Mallory was surprised that past conversations on the device had not been erased. He was showing the agents how to move a message from normal to secure mode when the secure messages appeared.

Mallory allegedly told the Chinese agents he had destroyed his paper records and planned to destroy all electronic records once they were sent.

He told the agents the documents on the phone were merely white papers he had written based on his own knowledge. While he told the FBI agents he had been paid $25,000 by the Chinese operatives, the court files show, he said the money was only for his consulting services in the country and expenses.

Between 1990 and 2012 Mallory was stationed in Iraq, China and Taiwan; he is fluent in Mandarin Chinese. He founded a consulting company, GlobalEx, in 2010.

He attended Brigham Young University and then served in the military. He also served in active army deployments in more recent years.

Charlie Sherrod, a friend and former financial advisor, was shocked by the arrest and charges.

“I find it very hard to believe that he would do something like that,” he said Thursday. He knew Mallory as “a strong Christian and a family man.”

A woman who answered the phone at Mallory’s residence said she was unfamiliar with the charges and wanted to consult a lawyer before commenting.

Mallory appeared in court wearing a loose tank top and gym shorts.

He faces up to life in prison. He will return to court Friday for a detention and preliminary hearing.

“The conduct alleged in this complaint is serious and should send a message to anyone who would consider violating the public’s trust and compromising our national security by disclosing classified information,” said Dana J. Boente, Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security and the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

Devlin Barrett contributed to this report.</s>A U.S. citizen appeared in court on Thursday to face charges that he had transmitted highly classified documents to Chinese agents. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Kevin Patrick Mallory is accused of transmitting documents classified top secret and secret to Chinese intelligence.

Mallory, who is 60 and fluent in Mandarin Chinese, reportedly traveled to Shanghai twice earlier in 2017 to meet with a person he allegedly believed worked for Chinese intelligence. He is charged with making false statements to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and “gathering or delivering defense information to aid a foreign government.”

A criminal complaint (PDF) filed by the Department of Justice details the circumstances of Mallory’s alleged actions. The complaint is highly suggestive of the fact that Mallory may have worked within the U.S. intelligence community — perhaps at the Central Intelligence Agency — between 1990 and 2013. Before 1990, he worked as a special agent for the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomatic Security Service.

The complaint notes that Mallory had been “stationed in locations including Iraq, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and the greater Washington D.C. area.” Mallory carried a top secret U.S. government security clearance “during much of that time.” Mallory’s clearance had expired after he left government service.

The complaint goes on to detail Mallory’s exchange of classified national security information for cash during a trip to China earlier this year. Interestingly, the complaint includes Mallory’s own account of how he was recruited by a Chinese agent and given instructions to use a burner cell phone (a “communication device”).

The complaint notes that a demonstration of the communication device is what led to FBI agents seeing the message history between Mallory and his Chinese handlers. The documents Mallory had provided to the Chinese agents were confirmed to have been classified top secret and secret.

“The conduct alleged in this complaint is serious, and these charges should send a message to anyone who would consider violating the public’s trust and compromising our national security by disclosing classified information,” said Dana Boente, acting assistant attorney general for national security and the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

The incident adds to an ever-growing list of instances of U.S. citizens being successfully recruited by Chinese foreign intelligence to leak sensitive national security information. Earlier this year, a U.S. State Department employee, Candace Marie Claiborne, faced similar charges for lying to U.S. investigators about repeated contacts over multiple years with Chinese intelligence agents.

Both cases also serve to illustrate that Chinese foreign intelligence agents do not particularly favor Chinese-origin Americans for recruitment, despite a few recent cases of note.</s>Caught with a bag of cash and an electronic device used to communicate with his handlers, a former government official with years of military and intelligence experience is accused of spying for China.

Kevin Mallory of Leesburg, Virginia is charged with providing defense-related information to a foreign government and lying to federal agents.

Mallory allegedly provided several classified government documents to a Chinese contact, who initially claimed affiliation with a prestigious Shanghai think tank, in exchange for cash. Documents filed by federal prosecutors depict Mallory, an experienced Chinese-speaking former operative, as a bumbling spy who executed his treason clumsily.

Mallory’s career spanned decades and multiple government agencies. After graduating from Brigham Young University in 1981, he served as active duty military and then an Army reservist for several years. From 1987 to 2013, he worked for different government agencies and U.S. defense contractors — as well as the CIA, according to a report in the Washington Post. He held a top secret security clearance for much of that time and was posted to regions including Iraq, China, and Taiwan.

It was only this year that Mallory allegedly began to stray from the straight and narrow, according to court documents. A Chinese handler posing as an employee of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences (SASS) made contact with Mallory during trips to China in March and April.

The SASS is a reputable and internationally known think tank. But it also maintains a close working relationship with the Shanghai State Security Bureau, a regional office of the Ministry of State Security, China’s intelligence arm.

In the following weeks, Mallory allegedly provided classified documents to Chinese intelligence officials in exchange for $25,000.

The FBI’s affidavit describing Mallory’s espionage activity appears to indicate that the former CIA officer tried to cover up his crimes. After he was stopped at Chicago’s O’Hare airport returning from Shanghai with $16,500 in undeclared cash in one of his bags, Mallory approached American intelligence agencies to describe his meetings in Shanghai with individuals he described as Chinese intelligence officers.

Having been caught with a payment that investigators believe was in exchange for classified government information, Mallory disclosed his contacts with the Chinese intelligence officers and may have offered his services as a double agent in order to conceal his alleged espionage on behalf of Beijing. The FBI affidavit never claims he offered to serve as a double agent, but in approaching an unspecified government agency with a communications device provided to him by the Chinese, Mallory appears to have made an overture to an American intelligence agency.

“He had a security clearance, he had apparently also worked at CIA, so he knew what he was doing,” said Peter Mattis, a former government analyst and now a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation’s China Program.

But then Mallory made what Mattis called a “stupid mistake.”

The FBI affidavit filed in a Virginia federal court this week paints a picture of extraordinary technical incompetence by Mallory and his alleged Chinese handlers. Mallory’s Chinese contacts supplied him with a communications device — likely a smart phone — to exchange messages and allegedly transfer classified documents.

In a May 24 meeting with FBI agents, Mallory showed off the device and demonstrated how to move from a “normal” to “secure” messaging mode. When he toggled over to the secure mode, he was surprised to find that it displayed a history of his secure messages. Mallory seems to have assumed they would be deleted.

Mallory voluntarily turned the device over to the bureau for a forensic analysis. When the bureau’s technical experts dug into it, they were able to recover additional secure messages exchanged between Mallory and his Chinese contacts.

In an exchange of messages on May 3, 2017, Mallory’s handler asked why the documents had been blacked out at the top and bottom. “The black was to cross out the security classification (TOP SECRET//ORCON//,” Mallory replied. “I had to get it out without the chance of discovery. Unless read in detail, it appeared like a simple note.”

Two days later, Mallory discussed his motives with his handler: “Your object is to gain information, and my object is to be paid.” His handler replied: “My current object is to make sure your security and try to reimburse you.”

The FBI analysis also discovered four documents on the phone, three of which are described in court documents as government materials. One is top secret; the other two are classified as secret. The affidavit provides no hint as to what the documents contain.

Mattis told Foreign Policy that the “scope, scale and potential impact of Chinese intelligence operations” has been of primary concern to U.S. national security agencies for years.

Chinese think tanks, including SASS, often work closely with the Ministry of State Security. China’s spy arm prefers to meet sources inside China, and social science academies provide a useful front for intelligence and influence operations.

“Chinese think tanks can be used to invite someone over who is either a person of interest or a source,” said Mattis. “That person comes over and gives a talk, and they’ll be met and have meetings with the local state security element or the People’s Liberation Army.”

But some intelligence-linked Chinese think tanks also maintain a known presence in Washington. One of those is the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, which bills itself as a “comprehensive research institution” but which is also an official numbered bureau of the Ministry of State Security, functioning rather like the CIA’s Open Source Center.

The institute actively engages in the Washington think tank ecosystem and also invites U.S. officials and academics for events in Beijing. The Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan Washington think tank, has co-hosted numerous cybersecurity dialogues with the Chinese institute in recent years.

For more than two decades, the institute has sent a fellow to Washington, who stays for a year or two, according to Mattis. “I guess some people find value in talking with them,” he said. “I have mixed feelings on that score.”</s>"Infosec Intelligence Conclave 2017" on 12th - 13th October in Bangalore, India, will include a two-day conference which connects C-Suite & senior executives, essential infrastructures with innovative solution providers & renowned infosec experts

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An American who formerly worked for the Central Intelligence Agency is arrested on charges of selling classified information to Chinese operatives in May 2017.