A former officer with the US Defense Intelligence Agency has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China, according to the US Justice Department.
Ron Rockwell Hansen, 58, was reportedly taken into custody by the FBI following an investigation that found that he had received up to $800,000 for providing information to the Chinese government.
He faces 15 espionage charges, including attempting to gather or deliver national defence information to aid a foreign government and acting as an unregistered foreign agent.
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He was allegedly “carrying classified information when he was taken into custody on Saturday while on his way to board a flight to China”, says The Guardian.
“His alleged actions are a betrayal of our nation’s security and the American people and are an affront to his former intelligence community colleagues,” said John Demers, the head of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
Hansen served as a Defense Intelligence Agency case officer while he was on active military duty from 2000 to 2006, later working for the agency as a civilian employee and a contractor, holding a top secret security clearance for many years.
The FBI began to investigate him in 2014. He was reportedly unaware of the probe, and he voluntarily participated in nine meetings with federal agents in Utah.
During those meetings, Hansen “told the FBI that Chinese intelligence had tried to recruit him, offered to cooperate as a source and even provided thumb drives to the FBI that contained classified materials he was not authorised to have”, Reuters reports.
Hansen is the latest in a line of former US intelligence officers accused of spying for China.
Former CIA case officer Jerry Chun Shing Lee was arrested earlier this year for conspiring to sell national defence information to China, and former US intelligence employee Kevin Mallory is currently on trial on similar charges.
