A retired FBI special agent has admitted to illegally keeping a trove of national defense secrets, undercover credit cards and even a lock-picking set at his Colorado Springs home for years after leaving the bureau. Yen Cham Yung, 62, pleaded guilty to three misdemeanor counts of unlawful possession of government property, admitting he took at least 69 documents containing secret information along with FBI-owned electronics he knew he should not have kept.
According to the Chicago Tribune, the case began unraveling in a deeply personal way. Yung's wife searched their Colorado Springs home for documents related to their separation and instead found the stash of sensitive materials, prompting her to file an order of protection against him, a discovery detailed by AP News. That domestic dispute in August 2019 set off the federal investigation that led to Yung's arrest in Colorado in June 2020.
Federal prosecutors unsealed a criminal complaint against Yung in the Northern District of Illinois following that arrest, tying the case back to the Chicago field office where his career began. Yung joined the FBI in 1996 and spent 20 years working in field offices in Chicago, Hawaii, Washington, D.C., and Indonesia before retiring in 2016, per the Tribune's reporting. He later served as the bureau's liaison to the Defense Department's Northern Command, which is headquartered in Colorado Springs and, per U.S. Northern Command, serves as the military's primary homeland defense headquarters coordinating with the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.
A Home Full of Classified Material
The scope of what agents recovered from Yung's residence reads like an evidence locker. Investigators found 7,000 unclassified documents, 66 CDs and DVDs, 141 floppy discs, 16 thumb drives, and seven video cassettes, the Tribune reported. Among the material were sensitive government documents concerning terrorism and national defense, email threads between FBI supervisors about organized crime investigations, and information about surveillance of gang activity and undercover informants.
Yung held top government security clearance during his career, and his credentials were used to access a CIA-FBI memorandum of understanding in 2009 concerning agency activities both overseas and domestically, according to the Tribune's reporting. He was accused of violating national security protocols and illegally keeping government documents without consent, though he was not accused of selling or disseminating any of the information he retained.
From Airspace Enforcement to Home Storage
Long before the documents piled up at his house, Yung had been a public face for the bureau's work with the military. In 2010, while serving as the FBI liaison to NORAD and USNORTHCOM, he publicly explained law enforcement roles and multi-agency jurisdiction during temporary flight restriction airspace violations, a role that required coordinating across the Department of Justice, the Transportation Security Administration and the Department of Defense.
That same authority appears to have extended to what he brought home. Yung took two early-era BlackBerry phones and camera equipment, and agents also found two credit cards bearing an undercover alias name at his home, along with a dollar bill marked with handwritten Chinese characters. As part of his plea deal, Yung agreed to forfeit those items along with FBI parking placards, a cigar case, a lock-picking set, binoculars, a survival kit, and thumb drives marked secret U.S. government property.
Legal Exposure and What Comes Next
Retaining classified government documents without authority is codified under 18 U.S.C. § 1924, a felony statute carrying maximum penalties of up to five years in federal prison per count, according to the Chicago Criminal Lawyer Blog. Instead, Yung pleaded guilty to misdemeanor counts under 18 U.S.C. § 641, which covers unlawful possession or conversion of government property valued at $1,000 or less and carries a maximum of one year in prison, per Federal Lawyers.
That resolution fits a pattern federal prosecutors have followed in similar cases. A Department of Justice legal analysis compiled in 2022 found that cases involving former government personnel hoarding sensitive documents without evidence of dissemination or intent to harm national security routinely end in misdemeanor plea agreements rather than felony espionage convictions. Comparable prosecutions, including former CIA contractor Reynaldo Regis, who pleaded guilty in 2021 under § 1924 for storing sensitive notes at home, typically resulted in non-custodial or low-guideline sentences of zero to six months when no dissemination took place.
Yung now faces six months to three years in prison under his plea agreement. U.S. District Judge Thomas Durkin has set his sentencing for December 7, ahead of which the court will weigh Yung's top-secret clearance and the sensitivity of the retained records against his two-decade law enforcement career and the absence of any evidence he shared the material. Earlier in the case, U.S. District Judge John Z. Lee issued a protective order under Section 3 of the Classified Information Procedures Act to restrict access to classified discovery materials, underscoring how carefully the evidence itself had to be handled inside the courtroom.
