CIA employee accused of leaking classified information about Israeli attack plans, for which he will be charged in Virginia

WASHINGTON (AP) — A CIA employee charged with… leaking secret information Assessing Israel’s previous plans to attack Iran, a federal judge ordered criminal charges in Virginia on Thursday.

The FBI arrested Asif William Rahman in Cambodia this week, and he made his first court appearance in Guam on Thursday. A judge there ordered him transferred to northern Virginia, where he was indicted last week on two counts of intentionally retaining and transmitting national defense information.

Court documents do not indicate which federal agency he employed, but a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it publicly confirmed to The Associated Press that it was the CIA.

The indictment does not go into the details of the allegations, but says Rahman had a top-secret security clearance and had access to sensitive, compartmentalized information. It accuses him of having unauthorized possession of top secret documents related to national defense information and then illegally sharing them.

It was not immediately clear who will represent Rahman in Virginia and speak on his behalf.

The charges stem from the documents attributed to the National Agency for Geospatial Intelligence And National Security Agencyappeared last month on a channel of the messaging app Telegram. The documents noted that Israel was still moving military assets to conduct a military strike in response Iran’s blistering ballistic missile attack on October 1.

Israel conducted one retaliatory attack on air defense systems and missile production facilities in Iran in late October.

The documents could be shared within the ‘Five Eyes’, which are the United States, Great Britain, Canada, New Zealand and Australia.

The emergence of the documents led to an FBI investigation examining how the documents were obtained — including whether it was an intentional leak by a member of the U.S. intelligence community or obtained through some other method, such as a hack — and whether other intelligence information was contained in had been endangered. .

Officials also tried to determine who had access to the documents before they were posted.