By WASHINGTON, Jan 17 (AfrikTimes) – A CIA employee who was accused of leaking classified documents about Israel’s plans to strike Iran pleaded guilty on Friday to criminal charges that he willfully retained and transmitted national defense information, the U.S. Department of Justice said.
In pleading guilty, Asif William Rahman, who had worked at the U.S. intelligence agency since 2016, admitted in court that he illegally downloaded, printed, and distributed classified information on multiple occasions, including several in 2024. In the spring of 2024, he printed five documents that were labeled as secret and top secret from his work computer and took them home, court records in the case said. He then reproduced and altered them and shared them with people who were not legally entitled to receive them. To conceal his actions, Rahman deleted his activity from his electronic devices, brought the records back to work and had them shredded.
The logo of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is shown in the lobby of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia March 3, 2005.
A second time, in the autumn of 2024, the court filings said he printed another 10 documents with a top secret classification, took them home and shared them with others. Then on October 17, 2024, he printed two more documents related to plans by a U.S. ally to strike a foreign adversary, the court records said.
Those documents, which contained plans by Israel to strike Iran, later appeared online after a pro-Iranian Telegram account called “Middle East Spectator” published them. This case is filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Rahman, 34, from Vienna, Virginia, was arrested in Cambodia, according to court records. He is scheduled to be sentenced on May 15.
