Katrina Leung is a Chinese American native of Los Angeles, California who is a businesswoman and an accused spy. Leung has earned degrees from Cornell University and the University of Chicago, and is an important figure in the Los Angeles Chinese-American community, having helped raise money for the campaigns of several prominent Republican party candidates. In the early 1980s she was recruited by the FBI's Los Angeles office chief of Chinese counter-intelligence, James J. Smith, and given the code name "Parlor Maid". Working with Smith, Leung became a valued information asset and was paid $1.7 million for her services over the years.

Eventually Leung and Smith, both married, began a 20 year sexual affair. Leung had access to classified FBI documents Smith would bring to their trysts, and in early 2003 was arrested and charged with working as a double agent for the People's Republic of China government. FBI officials say they will have to re-evualate a decade's worth of counter-intelligence work as a result of the charges against her. Smith has been arrested and charged with gross negligence. Leung also had an affair with William Cleveland Jr., a former FBI agent and chief of counter-intelligence at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Since her arrest, Leung's family has maintained her innocence, and in a press statement compared her plight to nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee, who after being accused of nuclear espionage, was eventually acquitted of all major charges.

The document at the heart of the case is a copy of a June 12, 1997, FBI memorandum found in Leung's home concerning Chinese fugitives that also "discussed reporting of national defense information by a confidential FBI source," the Justice Department said.

But investigators seized other sensitive materials found during consensual searches of her home, including a transcript of telephone conversations between Leung, whose Chinese government code name was "Luo," and a Chinese official, whose name was "Mao," court documents said.

During interviews with the FBI, Leung admitted to copying documents from Smith's briefcase, but said he did not know she was doing so, investigators said. She also said, however, that he would allow her to review documents without copying them.

Smith acknowledged in interviews with the FBI that he had "probably told Leung too much" in the course of operating her as an intelligence asset.

According to two affidavits totaling 60 pages, Smith and Leung have been secretly monitored since last summer as part of a foreign counterintelligence investigation that included the use of wiretaps, physical surveillance and clandestine searches.

Smith also was arrested Wednesday. He was among the FBI agents who had investigated whether China illegally tried to channel money into the 1996 presidential election.

In the late 1990s, Smith served as the FBI contact or "handler" for Johnny Chung, the Chinese American businessman who was central to the Democratic fundraising scandal that plagued the Clinton administration. Smith has hired the same defense attorney, Brian Sun, who represented Chung.

• We've got a double-agent sleeping with her "handler" and getting his reports.
  
• Suddenly there's all this evidence her "handler" is turning up that says the PRC is trying to influence Presidential Elections.
  
• Meanwhile, our double-agent is raising funds for Republican candidates.
  
• Oh, and she was also [link|http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A5634-2003Apr10¬Found=true| sleeping ] with the head of counter-security over at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. That's a nuclear-weapons lab. (For those of you wonder how China got those nuclear weapons secrets..)