On Wednesday, former Air Force intelligence office Monica Witt was charged with espionage for allegedly defecting to Iran and helping create a cyber-spying operation which targeted her former colleagues.
CBS News reports that Witt is accused of defecting to Iran in 2013 and sharing highly-classified U.S. intelligence about a classified Department of Defense program. Authorities claim Witt collaborated with the elite Iranian military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The FBI’s wanted listing says that Witt was indicted by a grand jury on February 8, and charged with “Conspiracy to Deliver National Defense Information to Representatives of a Foreign Government and Delivering National Defense Information to Representatives of a Foreign Government.”
“Monica Witt is charged with revealing to the Iranian regime a highly classified intelligence program and the identity of a U.S. Intelligence Officer, all in violation of the law, her solemn oath to protect and defend our country, and the bounds of human decency,” assistant attorney general John Demers wrote in a statement.
Witt, 39, had high-level security clearances and was in the Air Force from 1997 to 2008, then became a Defense Department contractor until 2010. She also reportedly went abroad several times on counterintelligence missions.
In 2013, she tried to move to Iran but Iranian officials were suspicious of her.
“I just hope I have better luck with Russia at this point,” she told the unnamed Iranian-American. “I am starting to get frustrated at the level of Iranian suspicion.”
Yahoo News reports that she wrote a message claiming that she might “do like [Edward] Snowden,” the former US intelligence contractor who leaked thousands of highly-classified documents about the National Security Agency in 2013 before being granted asylum in Russia. – READ MORE