Ex-FBI Agent Gets Probation, Fine In Spy Leak Case

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

A federal judge sentenced a former FBI agent to a year of probation and fined her $1,000 yesterday for disclosing details of an espionage investigation to the target of the probe. Lawyers for the ex-agent, Denise Woo, said the outcome was a triumph for their client, who pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge in a plea bargain with prosecutors.

“We think this is a total victory and it represents the complete collapse of the government’s case,” a defense attorney, Carolyn Kubota, told The New York Sun. “They had charged her with five felonies, including a very serious national security violation that carried a mandatory minimum of 10 years in jail.… In the end, the government folded up its tent and went home and agreed to no jail time.”

Ms. Kubota said the judge, R. Gary Klausner, made no substantive comments as he imposed the sentence at a hearing yesterday morning in Los Angeles. Ms. Woo was accused of tipping off a Southern California engineer, Jeff Wang, that the FBI was investigating him because of a tip from an informant. The initial indictment, filed in 2004,charged the former FBI agent with violating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by disclosing the identity of a covert agent.

In an interview yesterday, Ms. Woo said she provided information to Mr. Wang, a family friend, only after she went to her superiors with evidence of the engineer’s innocence.

“I tried to stop an unwarranted investigation of an obviously innocent person. The situation just sort of snowballed from there,” Ms. Woo said. “I spent many, many months, many, many meetings, escorting, going to every level of management with, not my suspicions, but hard-core evidence that this person was innocent.”

However, Ms. Woo, 47, acknowledged error in how she tried to rectify the situation. “My intent was to be a law-abiding whistleblower, but I think my execution of it was flawed,” she said.

Ms. Woo was suspended in 1999 after about four years at the FBI. She was fired in 2003. A recent Justice Department report indicated that a top agent in the Los Angeles office, James Smith, harbored serious concerns about the probe of Mr. Wang and about the informant who triggered it. A trial of Ms. Woo would have highlighted the disarray in the FBI’s counterintelligence program against China in the 1990s. Two top agents, Smith and William Cleveland, had extramarital sexual affairs with one of the FBI’s top informants, Katrina Leung. The FBI later concluded that she was relaying classified information to the Chinese government. Leung and Smith pleaded guilty to felonies but served no jail time.

“Clearly, that was a factor,” Ms. Kubota said of the government’s desire to avoid a trial. “There was a possibility we would be calling people involved in that scenario.”

Mr. Wang, who was never charged, went to court yesterday to show support for Ms. Woo.

“Denise Woo is the only person who was courageous and principled enough to stand up for me when the government made me the target of completely false accusations of espionage,” Mr. Wang said in a statement. “The government should be ashamed for its reprehensible treatment of me.”

Ms. Woo said Mr. Wang’s Chinese-American heritage “was an element” that led the FBI to forgo a diligent inquiry into the informant’s claims. A spokesman for the bureau, Kenneth Smith, declined to comment for this article.


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