A language expert assigned to a U.S. military installation overseas passed highly sensitive classified U.S. defense information to Hezbollah in Lebanon after falling into an emotional trap designed by an enemy nation, according to a U.S. Department of Justice report released Friday, March 26. She has now pleaded guilty.
Mariam Taha Thompson, 63, was commissioned to conduct top-secret U.S. government security inspections, the report said. She leaked the information to a foreign man after developing feelings for him through text message exchanges in 2017. Thompson admitted that she knew the man had a Family member who worked at the Lebanese Ministry of Interior.
The report said Thompson was assigned to a Special Operations Task Force base in Iraq in December 2019. The U.S. was launching a series of designated strikes against the Iranian-backed terrorist group Kata’ib Hizballlah during that Time.
The strikes culminated with the successful beheading of Qasem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps jihadist forces, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, founder of Kata’ib Hizballah, by a U.S. military drone on Jan. 3, 2020.
Thompson’s co-conspirators asked her for information about the U.S. military personnel who assassinated Suleimani. Thompson admitted that she knew the other side was from the identified foreign terrorist organization, Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Thompson is accused of passing the other side dozens of secret U.S. documents containing the identities of at least 10 covert personnel, as well as at least 20 U.S. strike targets. She also employed a variety of techniques and roundabouts in an attempt to escape culpability when she was arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in February 2020, the report said.
Alan Kohler, assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division, said, “It is shocking that Americans working overseas for the U.S. military would abandon their national interests to support terrorists …… because the defendant provided classified defense information to a foreign terrorist organization that put U.S. military personnel in harm’s way.”
Thompson faces a maximum sentence of Life in prison.
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