Former CIA agent Jerry Chun Shing Lee was sentenced to 19 years in prison for allegedly providing secret US defense information to China.

Lee, 55, a U.S. citizen, worked for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1994 to 2007. He was arrested in January 2018 for illegally possessing the secret defense information of America. Prosecutors accuse Lee of passing this important information to Chinese intelligence.

The indictment said Lee used to live in Hong Kong and in 2010, he started accepting money from Chinese spies to provide sensitive information about the CIA.

In May, Lee pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide defense information to support a foreign government, but insisted the government had never proved that he had given China any information or received 840,000 USD from Beijing as accusation.

"Lee betrayed the country because of his greed and put his colleagues at risk," said Timothy Slater, deputy director of the field office of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in Washington. "The seriousness of his betrayal and crimes has been reflected in today's verdict."

Lee worked in China and other countries when he was a CIA agent. This helped him gain knowledge about how the CIA collects information as well as the organization's resources.

When FBI agents began investigating Lee in 2012, he lived in Hong Kong and the CIA wanted to recruit him. The FBI now ransacked Lee's luggage and uncovered the data for force reception at the CIA and information regarding meeting locations, phone numbers, and secret facilities.

"This information will be of great value" to Chinese intelligence, the indict said. From 2010 to 2012, Lee was also accused of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars and providing information to two Chinese agents. But prosecutors and the CIA have never directly accused Lee of betraying the organization's China network. Nor did they publicly admit that the network was exposed and collapsed, although some intelligence experts had confirmed it.

Lee is the third former US intelligence official to be arrested in more than a year on charges of spying for China.