Intelligence officer arrested for leaking top secret information to journalists
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WASHINGTON - The feds busted a Defense Intelligence Agency worker Wednesday for leaking classified national defense information to two journalists in 2018 and 2019 — one of whom he was shacking up with.
Henry Kyle Frese, 30, a counterintelligence analyst from Alexandria, Virginia, who had a Top Secret security clearance, was indicted Tuesday on two counts of willful transmission of national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it.
“Frese was caught red-handed disclosing sensitive national security information for personal gain,” said John C. Demers, assistant attorney general for national security, who cited ex-Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ vow to pursue leakers as the motivation for the probe.
“Frese betrayed the trust placed in him by the American people — a betrayal that risked harming the national security of this country. This is one of six unauthorized disclosure cases the Department has charged in just over two years, and we will continue in our efforts to punish and deter this behavior.”
According to court documents, between mid-April and early May 2018, Frese took classified intelligence reports, some of which were unrelated to his job duties, and using his cellphone, gave top secret information about a foreign country’s weapons systems to an unnamed journalist.
Frese and the journalist had the same residential address for a year starting in August 2017, and, based on Frese’s social media pages, “it appears that they were involved in a romantic relationship for some or all of that period of time,” the feds said in a statement, New York Post has reported.
