A former National Security Agency (NSA) employee in the United States was given a sentence of nearly 22 years (262 months) in jail for trying to send confidential documents to Russia.
“This sentence should serve as a stark warning to all those entrusted with protecting national defense information that there are consequences to betraying that trust,” said Christopher Wray, the director of the FBI.
Between June 6 and July 1, 2022, Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 32, of Colorado Springs, worked as an information systems security designer and had access to sensitive data.
Dalke is reported to have communicated with someone he believed to be a Russian agent somewhere between August and September of that year, despite having only a brief employment with the intelligence service. The individual was, in fact, a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) undercover agent.
Then, using an encrypted email account, he sent the alleged Russian spy fragments of three top-secret National Defense Information (NDI) documents that he had worked on, demonstrating his “legitimate access and willingness to share.”
Dalke stated the information would be valuable to Russia and informed his contact that he would release more documents when he returned to Washington, D.C. Dalke sought $85,000 in exchange for sharing all the files he had.
He was then taken into custody on September 28, 2022, not long after using a laptop computer to send five files to the alleged Russian spy at Union Station in downtown Denver. In October 2023, the defendant entered a guilty plea to the offense.
“As part of his plea agreement, Dalke admitted that he willfully transmitted files to the FBI online covert employee with the intent and reason to believe the information would be used to injure the United States and to benefit Russia,” the U.S. Justice Department said.