US: NSA cyber specialist, army doctor charged in spying cases

A cyber specialist who worked at the US National Security Agency and an army doctor and her wife were charged Thursday in separate cases with seeking to sell US secrets to foreign governments.

In one case, cybersecurity expert Jareh Sebastian Dalke, 30, spent less than four weeks working at the NSA, the government's huge and powerful signals intelligence agency, before he suddenly quit, citing family problems at the end of June.

In the few weeks he was at the NSA, he printed out top secret documents, and after leaving he offered them for sale in encrypted online communications to what he thought was an agent of a foreign government.

But he was actually dealing with an undercover FBI agent.

The foreign government was not identified by the Justice Department.

Dalke, who the charges said had deep financial problems and had expressed unhappiness with American society, was provided two initial cryptocurrency payments worth more than $4,900, in exchange for evidence that he had top secret information.

Dalke asked for $85,000 for full documents, saying he had $237,000 in debts.

After he was paid another $11,422 worth of cryptocurrency, he and the undercover agent arranged for an electronic handover of documents in Denver, Colorado on Thursday.

Dalke was arrested at the handover location, and has been charged with three violations of the Espionage Act.

If convicted he faces a possible sentence of death or life in prison.

In a second case announced Thursday, a doctor for the US Army, Major Jamie Lee Henry, and her wife, Anna Gabrielian, an instructor of anesthesiology at Johns Hopkins University, were charged with offering to sell the health information of US military and government personnel to Russia. They were apparently motivated by the Ukraine war.