A military and commercial satellite engineer pleaded guilty Monday to federal charges of economic espionage and violating the Arms Export Control Act for selling information to a person he thought to be a Russian spy.
Gregory Allen Justice, 49, faces up to 35 years in prison for the two felony offenses, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
In a criminal complaint, a special agent with the FBI wouldn’t name Justice’s employer, instead calling it “Cleared Contractor A.” But the engineer’s father told the Los Angeles Times his son worked at Boeing Satellite Systems in El Segundo, California.
According to court documents, the company began monitoring Justice’s work computer in late 2015, and found he’d put files with detailed mechanical drawings and design information on to a USB drive. A few months later, in a court-authorized search, the FBI found a handwritten note with contact information for two Russian Embassy offices in Washington, D.C. One of them was the Office of the Defense, Military, Air and Naval Attachés.
On Feb. 10, 2016, Justice made a phone call in his car, which the FBI had been monitoring with listening devices. “Last autumn I sent a technical schematic and I called to follow up on that and spoke with the Naval Attaché for a moment and I was just calling to follow up to see if he was still interested in, in uh, maintaining contact and uh obtaining more of the uh, similar things to what I sent,” Justice said during the call.
A week later, he met with an undercover FBI agent, whom he believed to be a Russian spy. It was the first of six meetings the two held over several months. And Justice held nothing back.
“Since the 1980’s the United States Air Force has been building and launching surveillance satellites called WGS,” he told the phony spy. “We build those. So what I’m offering is basically everything on our servers, on our computers. The plans, the test procedures, that’s what I have access to.”
More:
http://www.guns.com/2017/05/26/defense-engineer-pleads-guilty-to-espionage-after-giving-secrets-to-russian-spy/
