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ARLINGTON, VIRGINIA - JUNE 21: An honor guard marches to their positions prior to an enhanced honor cordon to welcome Israeli Chief of Defense and Deputy Prime Minister Benny Gantz at the Pentagon June 21, 2021 in Arlington, Virginia. Gantz is in Washington for talks with officials at the Pentagon.
A female linguist who worked for the Pentagon in Iraq was sentenced to 23 years of imprisonment for providing confidential information to a foreign national associated with the Hezbollah.
Mariam Taha Thompson was charged in May last year with a criminal case for sharing highly sensitive classified national defense data. She believed the foreign national would provide the data to the Lebanese-based Hezbollah, a foreign terrorist organization associated with Iran.
The 62-year-old woman handed her Lebanese love interest a list of US spies' names that she has kept under her mattress. Thompson, who was given a sentence on Wednesday in Washington's federal court, said that she "just wanted someone to love [her] in [her] old age," reported Daily Mail.
Pleaded Guilty
Thompson, from Rochester, Minnesota, was a contracted linguist for a United States Special Operations task force in Iraq. She had top secret clearance and agreed to plead guilty in exchange for leniency, according to a US Justice Department official.
The Minnesota woman put the lives of human assets working furtively for the US at risk. She was indicted on one count of delivering defense information classified at the secret level to aid a foreign government. This charge upholds a maximum imprisonment of a lifetime, reported Albawaba.
John Demers, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's national security division, remarked, "Thompson's sentence should stand as a clear warning to all clearance holders that violations of their oath to this country will not be taken lightly, especially when they put lives at risk," reported Stripes.
According to court records, she signed an extensive statement of facts in late January admitting to the plot. The Justice Department stated that Thompson confessed in her guilty plea hearing that early 2017 Thompson started communicating with her co-conspirator through a video-chat feature on a secure text and voice messaging app and that she harbored a romantic interest in her associate.
Thompson never met the man personally. She was introduced to him on social media by her relatives from Lebanon in 2019. Thompson was hoping the man would marry her. The man, who was not identified in the indictment, asked her to marry him when she retired and convinced her to move to Lebanon.
She admitted that she communicated information to a Lebanese man whom she believed would relay the sensitive data to Hezbollah agents. Her contact was trying to obtain expounded information on individuals who may have been involved in the Jan. 3 assassination of Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force Commander Qasem Suleimani last year.
Her sentence depicts the human sources she jeopardized and the seriousness of her contravention of the trust of the American people and the troops who worked at her side as friends and colleagues, according to John Demers, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's national security division.
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