The US Department of Justice (DoJ) said in a statement on Friday that former US Defence Intelligence Agency officer Ron Rockwell Hansen has pleaded guilty in connection with his attempted “transmission of national information” to Beijing.
According to the DoJ, Hansen, 58, retired from the US Army as a warrant officer with a background in signals intelligence and human intelligence. Moreover, Hansen speaks fluent Chinese and Russian. The DIA hired Hansen in 2006 as “a civilian intelligence case officer”.
According to Justice Department, Hansen has admitted that in early 2014, “agents of a Chinese intelligence service targeted Hansen for recruitment, and he began meeting with them regularly in China. During those meetings, the Chinese agents described to Hansen the type of information that would interest the Chinese intelligence service. During the course of his relationship with the agents of the Chinese intelligence service, Hansen received hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for information he provided them, including information he gathered at various industry conferences”.
Notably, Hansen attempted to provide classified information for Chinese intelligence that “related to United States military readiness in a particular region and was closely held by the United States government”, according to the DoJ.
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