The
Washington Post is reporting that Petty Officer Bryan Minkyu Martin was
arrested sometime last week on suspicion of stealing classified documents from
military networks and attempting to sell them to a foreign agent.
Martin is a Navy specialist at the Joint Special Operations
Command. He has not yet been charged, but is under investigation for committing
espionage after accepting money in exchange for passing classified documents along
to an undercover FBI agent that he believed to be a foreign intelligence official.
According to the report in the Post, the first meeting took place at a hotel in North Carolina on
November 15. Looking ahead, Martin promised he would be a valuable asset in providing secret
information throughout his career, which he projected would last the next 15-20
years. In the days that followed, Martin passed along more classified
information, including documents marked Secret and Top Secret, and accepted some $3,500 in return.
The arrest comes in the midst of an ongoing scandal over the leak of classified State Department and Pentagon documents to the Website Wikileaks. U.S. government agencies are stepping up their efforts to secure classified
information and hopefully avoid another Wikileaks-like scandal. In recent days, U.S. Senators John Ensign (R-Nev.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn) and Scott Brown (R-Mass) have introduced legislation that would make it illegal to publish the names of military or intelligence community informants, The Hill reports.
