This week, Sebastian Dalke plead guilty to six counts of attempting to transmit classified DoD information to an agent of the Russian government. Dalke was arrested in September of last year for attempting to send classified information that contained National Defense Information (NDI) to a Russian agent. The Russian agent just happened to be an FBI online covert employee.
Dalke kicked off his efforts by sending excerpts of three classified documents to the FBI covert employee. All three documents were market Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). Dalke obtained all of them when he was an NSA employee, according to the DOJ.
His employment with NSA as an Information Systems Security Designer lasted less than a month. After he voluntarily terminated his job with NSA, the criminal acts occurred between August and September 2022. Dalke requested a leave of absence in lieu of quitting his job due to family health issues, but he was denied. He was however hired back by NSA with a September 28, 2022 start date at a different location.
At the end of August 2022, Dalke requested $85,000 in exchange for the rest of his information. He then coordinated a transfer with the FBI covert employee and transferred five files, with four of them being Top Secret. The fifth file was a letter in Russian.
In a tribute to keeping an investigation a secret, the complaint itself was filed one day before he was supposed to start, which means he was under watch by the FBI the entire time he was in the process of getting hired back by the NSA. Either they were displaying a magnanimous ruse by leading Dalke on, or did not, in fact, have any knowledge of the pending investigation. We may never know.
Dalke is an Army veteran who served in the medical career field. He separated in 2018 while holding a Secret clearance. During that time, he apparently racked up $50k in credit card debt and $32k in student loans. He then declared insolvency. When he was communicating with whom he thought was the Russian operative in 2022, he told them he was $237,000 in debt, of which $93,000 was due now. Anyone who’s been through the security clearance process knows that this should have factored into his adjudication – if it was actually true.
Dalke’s sentencing memorandum and court action should be an interesting insight into his comments to the FBI agent. The investigation and adjudication of his Top Secret clearance could be the best document we are never allowed to read. Sentencing is set for April 26, 2024. Dalke admitted his intent to send information to Russia and injure the U.S. He faces a maximum penalty of life in prison.
