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.
