A retired Army lieutenant colonel who was caught in an online ‘honeypot’ spy operation pleaded guilty to conspiring to transmit classified military information to someone he believed was a Ukrainian woman. The ‘woman’ prodded the former service member for information over a dating site by calling him her “secret informant love” and her “secret agent.”
David Slater was a civilian contractor for the U.S. Strategic Command in Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska, which oversees the U.S.’s nuclear weapons and war plans, when he began chatting with what he believed was a Ukrainian woman from around February 2022 to around April 2022, Department of Justice officials said in a release.
The messages were not coy.
“Beloved Dave, do NATO and Biden have a secret plan to help us?” the user wrote around March 18.
“American Intelligence says that already 100% of Russian troops are located on the territory of Ukraine. Do you think this information can be trusted?” she wrote around March 7.
Slater pleaded guilty Thursday to conspiring to transmit classified national defense information. According to federal court documents, Slater attended briefings on the Russia-Ukraine war that were classified as Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, or TS/SCI.
Slater could face a maximum of 10 years in prison, up to $250,000 in fines, and could lose certain federal benefits. His sentencing is scheduled for Oct. 8.
An email sent to Slater’s lawyer was not immediately returned.
Slater was also charged in April with two counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information but those charges were dropped under his agreement to plead guilty for the conspiracy charge, according to court documents. The DOJ described the information that he allegedly shared as military targets and Russian military capabilities.
The messages highlighted in court documents ranged from general U.S. efforts related to the Ukraine-Russia war to American intelligence about Russian or Ukrainian military plans. The user was referred to as a co-conspirator in court documents but referred to as a purported Ukrainian woman in DOJ releases.
A STRATCOM spokesman told Task & Purpose when charges were announced in April that Slater had worked as an Air Force civilian employee in STRATCOM’s logistics directorate until 2022. Slater held a Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information security clearance from around August 2021 to April 2022 and had signed a non-disclosure agreement.
“Access to classified information comes with great responsibility,” U.S. Attorney Lesley A. Woods from the District of Nebraska said in the release. “David Slater failed in his duty to protect this information by willingly sharing National Defense Information with an unknown online personality despite having years of military experience that should have caused him to be suspicious of that person’s motives.”
Slater served in the Army as an enlisted logistician from August 1981 to August 1984, and then again from July 2008 until December 2020, according to his service record.
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