UTAH
Ron Rockwell Hansen, 58, a resident of Syracuse, Utah, and a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, plead guilty today in Utah to attempted espionage, according to officials.
This was in connection with his attempted transmission of national defense information to China, officials said.
Sentencing is set for Sept. 24.
Hansen retired from the U.S. Army as a Warrant Officer with a background in signals intelligence and human intelligence.
He speaks fluent Mandarin-Chinese and Russian. Defense Intelligent hired Hansen as a civilian intelligence case officer in 2006, officials said.
Hansen held a Top Secret clearance for many years and signed several non-disclosure agreements during his tenure at Defense Intelligence Agency and as a government contractor.
As Hansen admitted in the plea agreement, in early 2014, agents of a Chinese intelligence service targeted Hansen for recruitment and he began meeting with them regularly in China, according to officials.
During those meetings, the Chinese agents described to Hansen the type of information that would interest the Chinese intelligence service.
During meetings with Chinese intelligence service agents, Hansen received hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation for information.
He provided information that included wht he gathered at various industry conferences.
Between May 24,2016 and June 2, 2018, Hansen solicited from an intelligence case officer working for the DIA national defense information that Hansen knew the Chinese intelligence service would find valuable, according to authorities.
Hansen agreed to act as a conduit to sell that information to the Chinese.
Hansen advised the Intelligence case officer how to record and transmit classified information without detection, and explained how to hide and launder any funds received as payment for classified information.
The DIA case officer reported Hansen’s conduct to the Defense Intelligence and subsequently acted as a confidential human source for the FBI.
As Hansen further admitted in the plea agreement, Hansen met with the Defense Intelligence case officer on June 2, 2018, and received from that individual documents containing national defense information that Hansen previously solicited.
The documents Hansen received were classified.
The information in the documents related to the national defense of the United States in that it related to U.S. military readiness in a particular region and was closely held by the U.S. government.
Hansen reviewed the documents, queried the Defense Intelligence case officer about their contents, and took written notes about the materials relating to the national defense information, according to officials.
Hansen advised the Defense Intelligence case officer that he would remember most of the details about the documents he received that day and would conceal some notes about the material in the text of an electronic document that Hansen would prepare at the airport before leaving for China.
Hansen intended to provide the information he received to the agents of the Chinese intelligence service with whom he had been meeting, and Hansen knew that the information was to be used to the injury of the United States and to the advantage of a foreign nation.
Hansen pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to gather or deliver national defense information to aid a foreign government, officials said.
Under the plea agreement, Hansen will be sentenced to 15 years