A former National Security Agency (NSA) employee pleads guilty to trying to sell top secret information to Russia.
The individual, 31-year-old Jareh Dalke, pleaded guilty to the charges on Monday that accuse him of attempting to sell classified information to a person who he believed was a Russian agent. However, the foreign agent was an undercover employee of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
Selling Top Secret Information
The defendant pleaded guilty to six counts of attempting to transmit national defense information to a foreign government. He admitted that in August and September last year, he tried to sell copies of three classified documents that contained information marked top secret-SCI (sensitive compartmented information).
Dalke is an Army veteran living in Colorado who started working as a civilian employee at the NSA in 2022. The defendant first shared excerpts of three classified documents with the undercover agency in August 2022 as a "small sample [of] what is possible" and later received large sums of cryptocurrency as payment, as per ABC News.
At one point, Dalke wrote that there was an opportunity to help balance the scales of the world while also tending to his needs. The defendant later requested $85,000 for all his information, which he said would be valuable to Russia.
Dalke agreed to transfer more classified material at a meeting at Union Station in downtown Denver and later sent five files that contained top-secret information. In a letter accompanying the documents, the defendant said he was very happy to provide the information to the supposed Russian agent.
Federal prosecutors in the case also agreed not to ask for more than 22 years of imprisonment for Dalke when he is sentenced in April. However, the judge will ultimately be the one who decides the punishment for the former NSA employee.
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Undercover FBI Agent
The army veteran faced a potential life sentence for giving the undercover FBI agent classified information. During his guilty plea before U.S. District Judge Raymond Moore, he only spoke in answer to questions about whether or not he understood the terms of the deal, according to PBS.
Dalke acknowledged that he has been taking medications for mental illness while he was under custody for roughly a year. The indictment against the defendant noted that the information he sought to give to Russia included a threat assessment of the military offensive capabilities of a third, unnamed country.
The information also included a description of sensitive U.S. defense capabilities, some related to that unnamed foreign country. Dalke allegedly told the undercover FBI agent that he decided to work with Russia because his heritage "ties back to your country."
The defendant said his other reason for the crime was to "cause change" after questioning the United States' role in causing damage to the world. However, court documents showed that Dalke also revealed that he was $237,000 in debt at the time, said the Associated Press.
