Katrina Leung was a Chinese-American businesswoman and longt
Katrina Leung was a Chinese-American businesswoman and longtime FBI informant who became the center of one of the FBI’s most embarrassing counterintelligence scandals involving China in the early 2000s. She was known inside the FBI by the codename “Parlor Maid.”
The FBI recruited her in the early 1980s because she had extensive contacts within Chinese political and business circles. Over roughly two decades, she provided intelligence on the People’s Republic of China and became one of the FBI’s highest-paid informants on Chinese matters. At the same time, U.S. authorities later alleged she was secretly working with China’s Ministry of State Security (MSS), effectively acting as a double agent.
A major part of the scandal involved her relationships with two FBI counterintelligence agents, especially James J. Smith, who handled her as an informant and with whom she allegedly had a decades-long affair. Prosecutors claimed Smith improperly shared classified information with her, and that she copied or transmitted sensitive material to Chinese intelligence.
In 2003, Leung and Smith were arrested. Prosecutors accused her of unauthorized handling of classified defense information, though she was never convicted of espionage itself. Much of the original case collapsed because a judge found prosecutorial misconduct, and in 2005 she ultimately accepted a plea deal on lesser charges related to mishandling documents and tax issues.
The broader significance of the case was institutional rather than cinematic. It exposed weaknesses in how the FBI managed informants, conflicts of interest, and counterintelligence oversight. Internal reviews later criticized the Bureau’s handling of Leung for years despite repeated warning signs.
The story has often been described in media as a classic “honey trap” or “sexpionage” case, though historians and investigators also point out that bureaucratic failures and poor supervision mattered at least as much as personal relationships.
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