Security News > 2021 > January > US cyber intelligence officer given 11 years for kidnapping her kid, trying to hawk top secrets to Russia in Mexico

A US Air Force intelligence officer who kidnapped her daughter to Mexico and attempted to defect to Russia with top-secret information is set to spend the better part of a decade behind bars.

According to court documents [PDF] her unusual story started in July 2019, when she fled her Hedgesville home and flew to Mexico City where she contacted the Russian embassy, offering classified documents that she had removed from secure locations over the past 20 years.

It's safe to assume that as a cyber specialist, Shirley was able to hide her tracks but there is no indication that she has experience of working in the field, and compared to Edward Snowden's carefully planned exit from the NSA with secret documents, it appears to have been a somewhat amateurish attempt to evade detection.

Five days after her arrest, the storage unit was searched and court documents note that she had visited it "Immediately before beginning the trip to Mexico City with her daughter." Search warrants for all of her devices and residences revealed, according to prosecutors, three key documents.

The most significant was a hard copy of a top secret NSA document "Outlining intelligence information regarding a foreign government's military and political issues" that "Cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States."

It is a virtual certainty that these three documents are only representative of many more documents that she possessed and had made plain would be willing to hand over to the Russian government in return for money, a new identity and passage out of Mexico.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/01/26/us_spy_russia_kidnapping/