WASHINGTON (AP) — A former intelligence analyst with the Pentagon’s supersecret National Security Agency was charged Tuesday with selling the Soviet Union top defense secrets, including a target list for some U.S. nuclear weapons, for $60,000.
Retired Army Sgt. 1st Class David Sheldon Boone, 46, a native of Flint, Mich., was arrested Saturday in a suburban Virginia hotel. He had been lured there from his home in Germany by a sting operation in which a Russian-speaking former FBI agent posed as a spy for Russia trying to get Boone to resume spying, the Justice Department said.
Boone told the FBI’s fake Russian spy that, during 1988-1991 in Germany, he sold the Soviets details of U.S. targets for tactical nuclear weapons in case of a Soviet nuclear attack and a 300-to 400-page handbook listing reconnaissance and intelligence collection systems used by the U.S. military, according to an FBI affidavit.
FBI agent Stephanie Douglas wrote that Boone told the fake Russian agent he had volunteered to spy for the Soviet Union in 1988 when his marriage was breaking up and he was so short of cash he used the Soviet payments for ordinary living expenses while serving in the Army in Germany.
Before 1991, when he left the Army and quit spying, the government said, Boone also provided his Soviet KGB contact — a man he knew as “Igor” — with U.S. documents describing the movement and capabilities of Soviet forces and Soviet tactical nuclear weapons.
The government accused Boone of selling data classified as “top secret” and as even more secret “sensitive compartmented information.” Its release to a foreign power “could potentially cause grave harm to the national security of the United States,” the government said.