A defense contractor with top security clearance was arrested Friday on charges of distributing classified defense documents to his Chinese girlfriend, according to Reuters.
Benjamin Pierce Bishop was a former U.S. Army officer who works at the U.S. Pacific Command in Oahu. He faces charges of "willfully communicating national defense information to a person not entitled to receive it, and one count of unlawfully retaining documents related to national defense."
Bishop, 59, has been romantically involved with the unnamed 27-year-old Chinese national since June 2011. The woman has been living in the U.S. on a visa.
From May of that year through December 2012, he allegedly passed national defense secrets to her on multiple occasions, including classified information about nuclear weapons and the planned deployment of U.S. strategic nuclear systems.
Other secrets included information on the United States' ability to detect foreign governments' low- and medium-range ballistic missiles, as well as information on the deployment of U.S. early warning radar systems in the Pacific Rim.
A court-authorized search of his home in November found around a dozen individual documents each with classification markings at the secret level, the affidavit said.
If convicted, Bishop faces 20 years in prison.
