Washington (AFP) – A former CIA analyst who leaked top secret US intelligence documents about Israeli military plans for a retaliatory strike on Iran was sentenced to 37 months in prison on Wednesday, the Justice Department said.
Asif Rahman, 34, who worked for the Central Intelligence Agency since 2016 and held a top secret security clearance, was arrested by the FBI in Cambodia in November.
In January, Rahman pleaded guilty at a federal courthouse in Virginia to two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information.
He faced a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison.
Iran unleashed a wave of close to 200 ballistic missiles on Israel on October 1 in retaliation for the killings of senior figures in the Tehran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups.
Israel responded with a wave of strikes on military targets in Iran in late October.
According to a court filing, on October 17 Rahman printed out two top secret documents "regarding a United States foreign ally and its planned kinetic actions against a foreign adversary."
He photographed the documents and used a computer program to edit the images in "an attempt to conceal their source and delete his activity," it said.
Rahman then transmitted the documents to "multiple individuals he knew were not entitled to receive them" before shredding them at work.
The documents, circulated on the Telegram app by an account called Middle East Spectator, described Israeli preparations for a possible strike on Iran but did not identify any actual targets.
According to The Washington Post, the documents, generated by the US National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, described aviation exercises and movements of munitions at an Israeli airfield.
The leak led Israeli officials to delay their retaliatory strike.
Any American whistleblower is a hero and should be celebrated.