The U.S. government's case against accused Chinese double agent Katrina Leung revolves around three national security documents that she allegedly lifted from the briefcase of the FBI counterintelligence officer who was her longtime handler and lover.
Though the general nature of those documents is described in Leung's indictment and in an accompanying FBI affidavit, new details about their contents have surfaced in recent legal filings by federal prosecutors.
They include the first disclosure of what Leung is alleged to have talked about with a Chinese spy agency official in telephone conversations intercepted by U.S. authorities. Among the topics was an FBI agent's counterintelligence assignment in China.
The other two documents are identified in court papers as a copy of a secret cable from an FBI agent in Hong Kong and a list of FBI agents assigned to the investigation of Peter Lee, a TRW scientist who pleaded guilty in 1997 to passing classified secrets to Chinese scientists.
The three documents were allegedly recovered during searches of Leung's San Marino home a few months before she and retired FBI agent James J. Smith were arrested.
Those documents are among more than 100,000 pages of records that prosecutors say they have provided to the defense so far. Both sides continue to battle over how much more should be disclosed.
Leung, a naturalized citizen active in Los Angeles' Chinese American community, was recruited by Smith in the early 1980s to gather intelligence on China. She became a highly prized FBI asset, bringing back valuable information during frequent trips to the mainland, where she hobnobbed with high-ranking Chinese officials, feeding them supposedly harmless information provided by the FBI.
Starting about 1990, however, Leung began working for the Chinese as well, supplying their spy agency, the Ministry of State Security, with information about her FBI employers, according to federal prosecutors.
Leung, 49, has not been charged with espionage; she has been charged with illegally copying and possessing national security documents that the prosecution says she intended to use, or could have used, to harm the interests of the United States. She says she is innocent.
During a search of her home in December 2002, investigators reportedly retrieved a five-page, single-spaced FBI document detailing eight telephone conversations Leung had with her handler at the Ministry of State Security in 1990 and 1991. Leung had kept it in a locked safe.
