A former CIA official pleaded guilty Friday to leaking top secret US intelligence documents about Israeli military plans for a retaliatory strike on Iran.
Asif Rahman, 34, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency since 2016 and held a top secret security clearance, was arrested by the FBI in Cambodia in November.
Rahman faces up to 20 years in prison after pleading guilty in a federal court in Virginia to two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.
Iran unleashed a wave of close to 200 ballistic missiles on Israel on October 1 in retaliation for the killings of senior figures in the Tehran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups.
Israel retaliated with a wave of strikes on military targets in Iran in late October.
According to a court filing, Rahman, on October 17, printed out two top secret documents "regarding a United States foreign ally and its planned kinetic actions against a foreign adversary."
He photographed the documents and used a computer program to edit the images in "an attempt to conceal their source and delete his activity," it said.
Rahman then transmitted the documents to "multiple individuals he knew were not entitled to receive them" before shredding them at work.
"Rahman also destroyed multiple electronic devices, including a personal mobile device and an internet router he used to transmit classified information," the filing said, discarding the destroyed devices in public trash bins.
The documents, circulated on the Telegram app by an account called Middle East Spectator, described Israeli preparations for a possible strike on Iran but did not identify any actual targets.
According to The Washington Post, the documents, generated by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, described aviation exercises and movements of munitions at an Israeli airfield and the leak led Israeli officials to delay their retaliatory strike.
"Mr Rahman betrayed the trust of the American people by unlawfully sharing classified national defense information he swore an oath to protect," Assistant Attorney General Matthew Olsen said in a statement.
Sentencing was set for May 15.
We might have had ww3 without him.
Quite literally a hero, he saved so many lives. I wonder how he got caught though...