US man guilty in espionage trial

US man guilty in espionage trial

Regan allegedly demanded $13m for intelligence material

A former US intelligence analyst has been found guilty of trying to spy for Iraq and China.

Brian Regan, 40-years-old and a father of four, showed no emotion as a jury returned its verdict after five days of deliberation.

The 12-person federal jury must now decide whether his efforts to sell top-secret defence information to Iraq merit the death penalty.

If executed, Regan would be the first person to be sentenced to death for espionage in the US since 1953.

He was found not guilty on another charge of trying to spy for Libya.

'Letter writer'

Prosecutors had said that Regan, a US Air Force sergeant who had worked for the National Reconnaissance Office, a military intelligence agency that builds and operates America's network of spy satellites, wrote a letter to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

In it he offered information that could have helped Baghdad to hide anti-aircraft missiles.

The letter, which was allegedly found on his home computer, demanded $13m in exchange for the secrets.

When he was arrested at Dulles International Airport near Washington, police allegedly found addresses for the Chinese and Iraqi embassies in Switzerland and Austria in his wallet and secreted in the sole of his shoe.

He was also allegedly carrying in his shoe the encrypted coordinates of a surface-to-air missile site in the "no-fly" zone in northern Iraq and coordinates of a missile site in China.

Previous cases

The Regan case is unusual in that the government has sought the death sentence in a case in which sensitive material was never actually handed over to another country or agency.

Ames betrayed at least one dozen recruited agents

In other high-profile cases defendants were spared the death sentence and instead given life in prison.

These include last year's well-publicised case of former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was sentenced to life imprisonment after pleading guilty to selling secrets to Moscow for $1.4m in money and diamonds.

In that case prosecutors dropped their attempt to seek the death penalty in exchange for the former agent's full co-operation in disclosing his spying activities.

In 1994 former CIA officer Aldrich Ames was also sentenced to life imprisonment in 1994 for spying for the former Soviet Union and Russia from 1985 to 1991.

Ames told investigators that he had betrayed at least a dozen Russian and Eastern European agents recruited by the CIA, for which he received $2m.

Several of those agents were subsequently killed.

The last Americans to be executed for spying were Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who were put to death in 1953 for conspiring to steal US atomic secrets for the then-Soviet Union.