Mariam Taha Thompson, a linguist employed by the US Department of Defense, was charged with sharing classified national defense information in March 2020. She has been sent to prison for more than two decades for sharing the identities of American spies to a Lebanese national connected to Hizballah. The 62-year-old pleaded guilty to placing spies and US military personnel in grave danger. She faces 23 years in prison.
Thompson began communicating with her co-conspirator in 2017 through video chat and voice messages. She was working as a linguist in an overseas US military facility. In January 2020, Thompson was asked for information about the “human assets” who had helped kill Qasem Suleimani. Thompson admitted that she knew her co-conspirator intended to pass the information to Lebanese Hezbollah and a high-ranking military commander. Thompson accessed dozens of files of human intelligence sources, Thompson had provided her co-conspirator with at least eight identities of human assets, ten US targets, and a number of tactics, techniques and procedures by the time she was arrested.
