More than six years after he was charged, a former FBI special agent who once worked in Chicago’s organized crime division admitted in federal court that he took sensitive government documents dealing with terrorism and national defense and hoarded them in his home after retirement.
Yen Cham Yung, 62, who achieved top government security clearance during his lengthy career, faces from six months to three years in prison after pleading guilty Wednesday to three misdemeanor counts of unlawful possession of government property.
Yung joined the FBI in 1996 and worked in field offices in Chicago, Hawaii, Washington, D.C., and Indonesia. He was given top security clearance when serving as an FBI liaison to the Defense Department’s Northern Command in Colorado Springs, where he retired in 2016.
The charges Yung pleaded guilty to included only the theft of FBI-owned electronics, including camera equipment and two early-era BlackBerry phones. But he admitted as part of the plea that he also took at least 69 documents containing “secret information,” including some that detailed national defense secrets, and kept them in his home in Colorado Springs.
When agents searched his home, they also found 7,000 unclassified documents as well as 141 floppy discs, 66 CDs and DVDs, 16 thumb drives, seven video cassettes, and two credit cards in Yung’s undercover alias name, according to his plea agreement.
Yung was arrested in Colorado in June 2020 on a criminal complaint that accused him of illegally keeping the documents without consent, including sensitive information about undercover informants, surveillance of gang activity and email threads between FBI supervisors concerning organized crime investigations.
The complaint also alleged Yung violated national security protocols by keeping a copy of a memorandum of understanding between the CIA and FBI “regarding the activities of those agencies overseas and domestically.” The memorandum had been accessed in 2009 at the Chicago FBI headquarters by someone using Yung’s credentials, according to the complaint.
The materials were first uncovered in August after Yung’s wife filed an order of protection against him and she began searching their Colorado Springs home for “documents related to their separation,” according to the complaint.
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Yung was not accused of selling or disseminating any of the information.
As part of the plea deal, prosecutors filed an eight-page list of items Yung has agreed to forfeit to the government. Included on the list: a lock picking set, FBI parking placards, a dollar bill with “handwritten Chinese characters,” a cigar case, binoculars, a survival kit, and numerous thumb drives marked “SECRET U.S. Government Property.”
In court Wednesday, Yung was asked by U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin to describe in his own words what he did. Yung, dressed in a charcoal gray suit, said he took certain items home with him and “retained (them) knowing I should not have.”
Durkin set sentencing for Dec. 7.