Jerry Chun Shing Lee, born in Taiwan in 1968, immigrated to the United States as a child and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. He grew up in Hawaii and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1992. After brief work in insurance, he joined the CIA in 1994, serving as an operations support officer and later as a case officer in the clandestine service, leveraging his fluency in English and Mandarin for East Asia operations. His CIA tenure spanned over a decade with overseas postings. He left in 2007 for private sector work, eventually moving to Hong Kong. Starting around 2010, Lee began cooperating with China's Ministry of State Security (MSS), providing classified information in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars, which contributed to the compromise and deaths of at least ten CIA informants in China between 2010 and 2012, severely damaging U.S. intelligence capabilities. Arrested in 2018 at JFK Airport, he pleaded guilty in 2019 to espionage charges and was sentenced in 2020 to 19 years in federal prison. The case highlighted CIA counterintelligence vulnerabilities and insider threats.