Defense Department Linguist Sentenced to 23 Years in Prison

 

In March 2020, I wrote and analysis of a U.S. Army contract linguist who was arrested for espionage. You can read that article here: Department of Defense Linguist Charged with Espionage – A Spy Story.

 

This week, that linguist, Miriam Taha Thompson, was sentenced to 23 years in prison for “delivering classified national defense information to aid a foreign government.” The sentence was part of a plea agreement – Thompson admitted that she knew that the Top Secret intelligence information that she was passing to a Lebanese national would be provided to Hizballah, a designated foreign terrorist organization. Given the fact that Thompson is 62 years of age, a 23-year sentence constitutes a virtual life sentence. 

 

I’m fine with that. She should spend the rest of her life in prison. When I wrote the article last year, we knew from Thompson’s admissions that she not only provided information that included true identities of eight human intelligence sources, she activity advised her Lebanese lover/case officer on how to collect more information on the sources.

 

What we did not know a year ago is that the operation in which she willingly participated was an Iranian intelligence operation focused on determining the American intelligence sources who made the assassinations of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Qods Force commander Qasem Suleimani  and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the founder of the notorious Iranian-backed and controlled Iraqi Shi’a militia Kata’ib Hezbollah. Both men were killed in an American drone strike on January 3, 2020 just outside the Baghdad International Airport.

 

The killing of Suleimani and al-Muhandis was made possible by an excellent U.S. intelligence operation. Likewise, the Iranian-Hizballah operation to ferret out the Americans’ human sources was also effective. Unfortunately, it is spy versus spy.

 

According to the Department of Justice announcement, in 2017, she started communicating a Lebanese national (an unindicted co-conspirator), with whom she entered into a romantic relationship. She was aware that he had ties to Lebanese Hizballah.

 

In December 2019, while Thompson was assigned to a Special Operations Task Force facility in Iraq, the United States launched a series of airstrikes in Iraq targeting Kata’ib Hezbollah; that effort culminated in the drone strike that killed Soleimani and al-Muhandis.

Following Suleimani’s death in January 2020, her Lebanese case officer began asking Thompson to provide “them” with information about the human assets who had helped the United States to target Suleimani. Thompson admitted that she understood “them” to be senior Lebanese Hizballah officials. It is widely understood that providing anything to HIzballah is the same as providing it to the IRGC.

 

After receiving this “request for information” – this is actually her tasking – in early January 2020, Thompson began accessing dozens of files concerning human intelligence sources, including true names, personal identification data, background information and photographs of the human assets, as well as reports detailing information the assets provided to the U.S. intelligence community.

 

By the time she was arrested by the FBI on February 27, 2020, Thompson had provided Hizballah with the identities of at least eight clandestine human assets and a list of at least 10 U.S. targets for future strikes.

 

She knew what she was doing.

 

As I said in my earlier article, no matter how naïve Thompson tries to appear, her own words transmitted to her case officer indicate her level of involvement. She warned her case officer that at least four of these U.S. assets were operating in Lebanon, targeting the Amal organization among others, and suggested that the assets’ telephones be tapped. That’s not just providing information, that’s actively participating in an operation of a hostile intelligence service against the United States.

 

My question for the U.S. intelligence community writ large, and specifically the Special Operations Task Force in Irbil – why was this relatively low-level contract employee capable of gaining access to human source true identification data?

 

Inexcusable. Someone should be held accountable for that, but will they? Doubtful – they found the spy, so it’s congratulations all around and back to business as usual.

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