One year after his arrest raised the specter of a damaging espionage scandal, a former FBI supervisor in Los Angeles pleaded guilty Wednesday to a far less significant offense: failing to disclose his 20-year sexual relationship with an accused Chinese double agent.
In a 20-minute appearance before U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper, former Agent James J. Smith acknowledged that he had lied to the FBI in August 2000 when he said in a routine interview that there was nothing in his personal life that would affect his ability to work in counterintelligence, or that could compromise his judgment.
FBI officials would later allege that Smith had not only carried on an affair with his longtime informant, Katrina Leung, but was so careless with classified documents that Leung had surreptitiously viewed and copied the documents -- at great risk to the United States.
Smith's plea bargain, the product of long negotiations between his attorneys and the U.S. attorney's office, calls for him to cooperate in the prosecution of Leung on five counts of illegally possessing national security papers. In exchange, authorities agreed to drop one count of mail fraud and two counts of gross negligence in handling classified documents. Sentencing was set for January 2005.
His offense carries a potential prison term of five years, although the effect of the plea agreement is that Smith, 60, will almost certainly serve little or no time behind bars.
"This agreement confirms what we have said all along: that he did not do anything to put the national security at risk," Smith's attorney, Brian A. Sun, said after the hearing at the Roybal Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles.
Smith, who was joined in court by his wife and adult son, declined to comment. But his attorney said Smith was grateful for the chance to put the possibility of a trial behind him. "He's going to move on with his life," Sun said. "He's paid a substantial price already."
Though the U.S. attorney's office and the FBI would not comment, federal authorities have tried to lower expectations in the case since the highly publicized arrests last year of Smith and Leung. A lengthy investigation, authorities said, had raised concerns about how the FBI's counterintelligence program had been run, particularly in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where another veteran agent had a long sexual relationship with Leung.
