US special forces veteran charged with spying for Moscow

A former US army green beret living in northern Virginia has been arrested and charged with divulging military secrets about his unit’s activities during more than a decade of contacts with Russian intelligence. Peter Rafael Dzibinski Debbins, 45, told Russian intelligence he considered himself a son of Russia, according to an indictment made public after his arrest on Friday. Debbins thought that the United States was too dominant in the world and needed to be cut down to size, prosecutors alleged. The indictment also stated that Debbins was motivated in part because of bitterness over his army career and a desire to establish business contacts in Russia. The espionage took place from 1996 to 2011, prosecutors said.“The facts alleged in this case are a shocking betrayal by a former army officer of his fellow soldiers and his country,” said FBI senior counterintelligence official Alan Kohler in a statement. Debbins’ mother was born in the Soviet Union, and Debbins met his wife in the Russian city of Chelyabinsk, where they were married in 1997, according to the indictment. Debbins allegedly periodically met Russian intelligence beginning in 1996, when he was a student at the University of Minnesota, through 2011. As far back as 1997, he was even assigned a code name by Russian intelligence agents Ikar Lesnikov, after signing a statement saying that he wanted to serve Russia, according to prosecutors. Debbins received nominal payments for his information, even though he initially refused the money. In one meeting with Russian intelligence, he accepted a bottle of Cognac and a Russian military uniform as payment, according to the indictment. Debbins will have an initial court appearance on Monday. He is charged under the espionage act with providing national defense information to those not entitled to receive it.


All data is taken from the source: https://www.theguardian.com/
Article Link:https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/22/us-special-forces-veteran-charged-with-spying-for-moscow

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