"Candace Marie Claiborne, accused of lying to investigators about her contacts with Chinese officials. ...Chinese agents wired cash into her bank account and showered her with gifts ...iPhone, a laptop and tuition at a Chinese fashion school...fully furnished apartment and a stipend."
Recklessness of this is beyond my comprehension, not just accepting cash but also communication and computing devices like iphone and laptop that may have been tampered with.
If you look at the cases where people are caught spying for non-ideological reasons, they usually have some issues that compromise their judgement.
The reward vs. risk ratio seems to be way off. You would assume that successful spy would be worth of tens of millions for the risk of spending rest of his/her life in a prison. Usually they settle for smaller sums. They just want to feel important and have a lifestyle and/or feel loved or have sex.
These people are not carefully selected and trained spies, well versed in opsec. More often they would be weak people given to temptations, and finding the source that could provide them with money and other goodies in exchange for access to whatever information they can lay their hands on. Given how many people work for the government, it's hard to expect every one of them to be impervious to bribery. Actually, we know for a fact many of them are not. So the only difference is that in this case foreigners do the bribing.
Otherwise it's nothing new - e.g. when somebody becomes a multimillionare while working for government or makes some spectacularly lucky investments and gets some unexplainably lucrative deals from people needing the influence in the government - it's completely routine. Most of the times they get away with it. So no one could blame a state dept worker for thinking maybe she could get away with it too.
Recklessness of this is beyond my comprehension, not just accepting cash but also communication and computing devices like iphone and laptop that may have been tampered with.
Details of the charges and bribery here.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/state-department-employee-arr...
Unbelievable lapse in judgement.