A former nuclear scientist at the New Mexico Los Alamos National Laboratory received a five year prison sentence on Wednesday for giving U.S. nuclear weapon secrets to an undercover FBI agent who he believed was a Venezuelan government official, the bureau announced.
Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni, a 79-year-old Argentinian physicist and U.S. naturalized citizen, pleaded guilty in June of 2013 to espionage charges and will be placed on three years of supervised probation after he is released from his five-year prison term, reported Reuters.
His 71-year-old wife was previously sentenced to a year in prison and three years of supervised release for involvement in the espionage case.
Mascheroni worked from 1979 to 1988 at the U.S. government facility in Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was developed, and his wife worked as a technical writer and editor at the facility from 1981 to 2010.
According to the 2010 indictment, the couple conspired to aid socialist Venezuela in the development of an atomic bomb, with Mascheroni telling the undercover FBI agent that he could help the country obtain a nuke within 10 years.
No Venezuelan officials actually sought classified information from the scientist, the FBI said.
FBI recordings made by the undercover agent and released Wednesday revealed that the scientist promised to build a total of 40 nuclear weapons for Venezuela, along with a bomb that would take out New York City's electrical grid, but leave the people unharmed, The Guardian reported.
Mascheroni was recorded saying he would do the deed in exchange for "money and power."
"I'm going to be the boss with money and power. I'm not an American anymore. This is it," he said to the undercover agent.
Mascheroni told the judge that a jury would have acquitted him if his case had gone to trial.
"I was basically selling used cars," he said, claiming that the information he passed to the undercover agent was already available online or was made up. "What I was selling was completely science fiction."
He said in an interview with The Associated Press that he only approached Venezuela after the U.S. dismissed his theories that a hydrogen-fluoride laser could produce nuclear energy.
