A former Pentagon official was sentenced on Friday to three years in prison for espionage after being convicted of giving classified information to a Chinese spy masquerading as an agent for Taiwan.
The sentence imposed on James Fondren, 62, of Annandale, Virginia, was significantly less than the six-and-a-half years sought by prosecutors.
US District Judge Claude Hilton said a lighter sentence was warranted because the information disclosed by Fondren caused little or no harm to US national security.
A jury last year convicted Fondren, who retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 1996 and later worked at the Pentagon as a civilian, on three of eight counts, including an espionage count.
Over a period of years, Fondren prepared several dozen “opinion papers” for a friend, Louisiana businessman Kuo Tai-shen (郭台生), who paid Fondren anywhere from US$300 to US$1,500 per paper.
Kuo, a naturalized US citizen from Taiwan, turned out to be a spy for China. He pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison. He was the key prosecution witness at Fondren’s trial.
Fondren is the second Pentagon official to be convicted in the Kuo case. Former Defense Department employee Gregg Bergersen pleaded guilty to providing secrets to Kuo and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.
Prosecutors said Fondren thought that Kuo was aligned with Taiwan. However, Fondren had reason to suspect that Kuo was working for Beijing — Fondren and Kuo once took a joint trip to China and met Kuo’s handler, a government official named Lin Hong.
Fondren, for his part, testified that he never intended to disclose classified information, and he thought everything in his opinion papers came from publicly available information. He is appealing his conviction.
In a brief statement to the judge before he was sentenced, Fondren said: “I should not have helped my friend [Kuo] in his business.”
The sole espionage count on which Fondren was convicted centered on a classified document from November 2007 on talks between the US military and China’s People’s Liberation Army.
Prosecutor Neil Hammerstrom said that Fondren’s claims that he was unaware of Kuo’s links to foreign governments are belied by the evidence in the case, including recorded conversations in which Fondren tells Kuo to tell his handlers the information they are seeking from him is too difficult to obtain.
Hammerstrom told the judge: “He knowingly committed espionage. He passed information to a spy for the PRC [People’s Republic of China].”
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