A former National Security Agency employee has been charged with espionage by the Department of Justice for allegedly trying to sell classified information to a foreign government, which appears to be Russia.
The DOJ said Thursday that Jareh Sebastian Dalke was a former employee of the NSA, and the charges revealed that between August and September 2022, Dalke “used an encrypted email account to transmit excerpts of three classified documents he had obtained during his employment” to someone Dalke “believed to be working for a foreign government,” although that person was an undercover FBI agent.
Prosecutors said Dalke “subsequently arranged to transfer additional classified information in his possession to the undercover FBI agent” in Denver and that the FBI arrested Dalke on Wednesday after he arrived at the specified location.
Dalke had worked as an information systems security designer at the NSA from June 6 to July 1 this year, working at an agency office near the nation’s capital. He resigned this summer and engaged in communications with an undercover agent.
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The indictment said Dalke “expressed his belief that he was communicating with an individual associated with a particular foreign government (‘Foreign Government-1’), a country with many interests that are adverse to the United States.”
The FBI special agent who penned the affidavit did not specifically name the foreign government, but it is identifiable as Russia.
The indictment said Dalke sent two emails on Aug. 23 and Aug. 24, in which he requested that the FBI’s online covert employee take steps to verify that the person he was communicating with was truly a member of the foreign government. Dalke allegedly wrote that he had reached out through “multiple published channels to gain a response” and that “this included submission to the SVR TOR site.”
A footnote in the indictment states that the SVR, or Foreign Intelligence Service, is “the Russian government’s external intelligence agency.” TOR is short for “The Onion Router” and is used to conceal an internet user’s location.
Dalke’s resume allegedly claimed that “he has elementary proficiency in Russian and Spanish.”
The indictment said Dalke sought assurances that the undercover FBI agent truly was a “[Foreign Government-1] entity rather than americans [sic] trying to stifle a patriot.”
It was a Russia-focused day for the DOJ.
Oleg Deripaska, a Putin-allied Russian oligarch who employed British ex-spy Christopher Steele as he compiled his dossier, was indicted along with co-conspirators for allegedly trying to evade the U.S. sanctions imposed against him.
Additionally, Jamie Lee Henry, an Army major who was also a doctor at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, and Henry’s spouse, Dr. Anna Gabrielian, were charged with attempting to sell soldiers’ medical information to Russian officials.
The DOJ said Thursday that Dalke was charged with three violations of the Espionage Act, which makes it a crime to transmit or attempt to transmit national defense information to a representative of a foreign nation with intent or reason to believe that information could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation. The law comes with a possible sentence of death or up to life in prison.
“Dalke requested compensation via a specific type of cryptocurrency in exchange for the information he possessed and stated that he was in financial need,” the DOJ said. “On or about Aug. 26, 2022, Dalke requested $85,000 in return for additional information in his possession. Dalke also told the FBI undercover agent that he would share additional information in the future, once he returned to the Washington, D.C., area. Although he was not employed by the NSA while communicating with the FBI, Dalke re-applied to the NSA in August 2022.”
Dalke submitted his resignation to the NSA on June 28 and lost his top-secret clearance on July 1.
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The defendant told an undercover agent in early August that he “recently learned that my heritage ties back to your country, which is part of why I have come to you as opposed to others” and that he had questioned the U.S.’s “role in damage to the world in the past and by mixture of curiosity for secrets and a desire to cause change.” The defendant added he had “exfiltrated some information that is of a very high level.”
