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Former CIA officer Kevin Mallory found guilty of selling secrets to China

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Kevin Mallory has always been a risk taker. In a twenty-year career in intelligence, he violated the terms of his top secret security clearance at least twice.

Last year he took his biggest gamble yet: simultaneously selling secrets to Chinese intelligence officers for $25,000 and exposing those spies to his old colleagues at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mallory, 61, bet a jury would believe he was acting as a freelance triple agent, luring the Chinese in so he could hand them over to U.S. authorities.

He lost.

On Friday, jurors in Alexandria federal court found the former CIA officer guilty of espionage and related charges.

Mallory “never wanted to help the U.S. government,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gibbs said during closing arguments Thursday. “That is totally and completely absurd.”

Whatever his motivations, Mallory ended up providing American intelligence details of how the Chinese recruit and communicate with foreign assets. And by maintaining his innocence and going to trial, he gave the public a glimpse of spy games that rarely see the light.

The two-week trial included testimony from an undercover CIA contractor and high-ranking intelligence officials, and it was closely watched by representatives of several “three-letter agencies,” as Judge T.S. Ellis III joked. Jurors saw the two classified documents Mallory sent to the Chinese and six more he loaded onto an SD card, in the process learning some details of a still-classified Defense Intelligence Operation and reading a CIA analysis of another foreign country’s intelligence capabilities.

Mallory, of Leesburg, Virginia, is a U.S. Army veteran who along with the CIA and DIA worked for several defense and intelligence contractors. By 2012, though, he had left government and was running his own consulting firm, with little success. He was three months behind on his mortgage and in serious debt when a Chinese headhunter reached out to him on LinkedIn in February 0f 2017.

Messages on the site, along with emails, online chat transcripts and taped interviews, show how Mallory quickly developed a relationship with a man calling himself at various points Michael Yang, Myers Yang and Yang Kai.

Yang passed himself off as a think tank representative looking for a consultant on foreign policy. But Mallory said in taped interviews played in court that Yang and his boss, who called himself Mr. Ding, were fairly open about their true motivations. On Mallory’s second of two trips to China last spring, Yang gave him a Samsung phone that had been modified with a customized secret chat application.

Mallory sent Yang at least two documents, including a white paper summarizing an undercover operation he had proposed at DIA. He had loaded the full proposal onto an SD card found in his home after his arrest, along with several more intelligence documents.

In the chat conversations, Yang presses for more useful information while saying his top priority is Mallory’s safety. Mallory says that for the risk he is taking, he needs a bigger reward.

“This follows what I believe to be a nearly classic evolving espionage relationship,” testified Hugh Michael Higgins, who a few weeks ago retired from overseeing operations at the DIA.

The proposal and the white paper based on it remain classified, but testimony and court documents sketch a vague outline.

Mallory would go undercover at a company that has a footprint in China and whose owners – in court called “the Johnsons” – already cooperated with the U.S. government. His goal would be to gather science and technology information.

“He was proposing to do something unique and sensitive,” testified Robert Ambrose, who oversaw such operations at DIA when Mallory worked there. “The idea had some merit and I had some concerns.”

Ambrose said a modified version of the plan did go forward, without Mallory’s involvement, and that the Johnsons worked with U.S. law enforcement for several years.

According to court records Mallory was let go by the DIA in 2011 in part because he shared details of the proposal with a private intelligence contractor.

The Johnsons talked to Mallory via LinkedIn in 2017 and told him they no longer had business in China, according to records shown in court.

That communication was a major breach. Higgins testified. As their former handler, Mallory should not have been in contact with the Johnsons.

Two men who worked with Mallory at intelligence contractors in Iraq testified their old colleague was always a risk-taker and rule-breaker – but not a traitor.

Mallory is “someone who leaned a little bit too far over his skis,” testified Rick Vandiver, who supervised the defendant for about two years at The Lincoln Group.

He said Mallory violated his security clearance and company policy. When asked if Mallory had broken the law, he said no only after it was clear the question was about U.S. law.

But “I never questioned he would be loyal to the United States,” Vandiver said. “In his heart his intent, I thought, was always righteous.”

Harry Cooper Jr., a retired CIA classification expert who trained former director John Brennan, argued that the two documents Mallory sent to the Chinese were not specific enough to actually cause harm.

“I’m looking to try to answer the question, ‘So what?’ ” Cooper testified in Mallory’s defense. “U.S. interest in Chinese military capability is no secret.”

Everything contained in those documents is echoed in the public domain, he said, and defense attorneys introduced news articles and declassified CIA documents to make that point.

But because those open source documents would shed light on the still-classified intelligence at issue in the case, for the purpose of the trial even the public articles were made classified at the “Secret” level.

Cooper no longer has a top secret security clearance and so did not look at other documents on the SD card that intelligence officials described as particularly damaging.

“The information itself still remains current and revelatory,” testified Higgins. “It would still have a severe impact on national defense.”

Had Mallory sent his full presentation detailing the proposal to go undercover at the company, Higgins said, “the repercussions for both individuals and companies are fairly dire.”

The guilty verdict caps one of several active prosecutions against intelligence community retirees accused of being co-opted by the Chinese government. Jerry Chun Shing Lee is a former CIA officer facing trial in Alexandria, Virginia, next year; ex-DIA officer Ron Rockwell Hansen was arrested last weekend in Utah.

All three are accused of turning to China after failing to find financial success in their post-government careers.