Former FBI Technician Pleads Guilty To Passing Information To China

A former FBI technician has pleaded guilty to acting as an agent of China.

Kun Shan Chun, 46, admitted in federal court in New York on Monday that he had passed sensitive information to a Chinese official on more than one occasion.

"At the time, I knew that was wrong, and I'm sorry for my actions," Chun said, according to Reuters.

Court documents state that Chun, a Chinese-born naturalized U.S. citizen who also went by the name Joey Chun, had worked as an electronics technician for the FBI since 1997 until his arrest in March. He had a top secret security clearance and access to classified information.

Since 2006, the Justice Department says, Chun had built relationships with associates in China, including one who described himself as a government official. He didn't report all of his associations to the FBI, as he was required to do.

Beginning in 2011, Chun disclosed sensitive U.S. information to the Chinese official, including "the identity and potential travel patterns of an FBI Special Agent," the Justice Department says in a statement.

According to the Justice Department, he also downloaded an organizational chart of the FBI, without the names, and sent it to the official; he later took photos of a sensitive area, with details on surveillance technologies used by the FBI, and passed those photos to the official.

In 2015, he told an undercover FBI agent that he would be willing to help pass sensitive U.S. information to his Chinese associates, in exchange for a cut of the payment, according to the DOJ statement.

In conversations with that undercover agent, according to the criminal complaint, Chun also said he received financial benefits from his Chinese associates, who would pay for prostitutes, cover some travel expenses and at least once had paid him thousands of dollars in cash.

The maximum sentence for his criminal charge is 10 years. Chun is scheduled to be sentenced in December.