Edition: U.S. / Global

F.B.I. Informant Is Charged With Copying Secret Papers

Published: May 9, 2003


The informant, Katrina Leung, 49, faces 50 years in prison if convicted on all five counts brought by a federal grand jury in Los Angeles. But Ms. Leung's defense lawyers said the F.B.I. was making her a ''sacrificial lamb'' to hide its own security failings, and her husband vowed after the charges were announced that she would be exonerated of all wrongdoing.

Justice Department officials said they believed that Ms. Leung was a double agent for China for about two decades beginning in the early 1980's, but the indictment returned today stops short of charging that she actually engaged in espionage by passing secrets to China.

The authorities said that while they believed they had ample evidence that Ms. Leung gained unauthorized access to national security material it would be harder for them to track her contacts in China and prove that she actually passed on national secrets. The difficulty of introducing classified evidence in open court could further complicate her prosecution, officials acknowledged.

After weeks of high-level debate at the Justice Department over how aggressively to prosecute the case, the grand jury brought charges that largely mirror the accusations that the authorities first made against her after her arrest on April 9.

The five counts against Ms. Leung all center on the alleged unauthorized copying or possession of sensitive national defense materials.

Ms. Leung, a businesswoman and political fund-raiser who is prominent in the Chinese-American community in Southern California, was recruited by the F.B.I. as an informant in the early 1980's. The F.B.I. paid her $1.7 million over the next two decades to provide sensitive intelligence on Chinese affairs that was considered so valuable it was used to provide numerous high-level briefings to the White House over the years.

But for virtually her entire career as an informant, Ms. Leung was having an affair with her F.B.I. handler, James J. Smith, a veteran supervisor in Chinese counterintelligence in the Los Angeles field office. The authorities say they believe that Ms. Leung would ''surreptitiously'' take secret documents from Mr. Smith's briefcase during his many visits to her home in the course of their affair.

Her indictment came one day after Mr. Smith was indicted on six counts of wire fraud and gross negligence for what the authorities said was allowing Ms. Leung to take the documents and for lying to his supervisor about their affair and about her reliability. Concerns that Ms. Leung was a double-agent first surfaced in the early 1990's, but federal officials say Mr. Smith did not report the full extent of those concerns.

Among the documents the authorities said Ms. Leung took from Mr. Smith were a 1997 report on Chinese fugitives, a transcript of a conversation Ms. Leung had with a Chinese handler named Mao, and a telephone list related to an F.B.I. investigation into Chinese nuclear espionage. The authorities are also investigating the possibility that Ms. Leung tipped off the Chinese to the fact that the United States had bugged China's version of Air Force One after Beijing bought it from the Boeing Company in Seattle.

Ms. Leung and Mr. Smith are likely to be arraigned on Monday. Ms. Leung remains in custody, and a Justice Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity said prosecutors plan to continue to fight her release on bond on the grounds that she is a risk to flee the country. Mr. Smith was freed on $250,000 bond shortly after his arrest, and Ms. Leung's family and lawyers maintain prosecutors are giving him preferential treatment.

Ms. Leung's husband, Kam Leung, speaking to reporters outside his home in Pasadena, Calif., after the indictment was announced, said prosecutors had demonstrated ''blatant discrimination against women and the foreign-born.''