Jareh Sebastian Dalke Tried to Sell NSA Secrets to an FBI Agent He Thought Was Russian and Got 262 Months

Jareh Sebastian Dalke had been an employee of the National Security Agency for less than a month when he started building the inventory he would later try to sell. From June 6 to July 1, 2022, he worked at Fort Meade as an information systems security designer, an Army veteran from Colorado Springs who already held a secret clearance from military service dating to 2016 and who was handed Top Secret // Sensitive Compartmented Information access for the civilian job. He asked for nine months away to help a sick relative. The agency said no. He resigned. Twenty-five days on the badge is a short career. It was long enough to walk out with excerpts of three documents the government says were national defense information at the TS/SCI level: material on U.S. defense capabilities, a foreign threat assessment, and a cryptographic program. On April 29, 2024, U.S. District Judge Raymond P. Moore in Denver sentenced him to 262 months, 21 years and 10 months, for trying to give that material to Russia. The Russian was an FBI employee the entire time.

Between August and September 2022, Dalke used an encrypted email account to send samples to a person he believed was a Russian officer. The point of the samples, he admitted in the plea, was to prove “legitimate access and willingness to share.” The bureau’s online covert employee paid him $16,499 in cryptocurrency for the excerpts. Dalke then priced the rest of what he said he could deliver at $85,000, a figure prosecutors noted was roughly a year of the NSA salary he had just given up. The New York Times reported that he told the supposed officer he needed the money for nearly $84,000 in student-loan and credit-card debt. He also wrote that there was “an opportunity to help balance the scales of the world while also tending to my own needs,” and that he had decided to work with Russia because his heritage “ties back to your country.” Debt, ideology, and a clearance are the three ingredients insider-threat trainers put on the same slide. Dalke managed to put all three in writing, to the wrong customer, inside a single email chain.

Union Station was the sale, and the buyer had a badge

The handoff was set for September 28, 2022, at Denver’s Union Station, inside a four-hour window, over a secure digital connection rather than a briefcase. Dalke arrived with a laptop. The first file he sent was not a secret. It was a letter that opened and closed in Russian. “My friends!” he wrote. “I am very happy to finally provide this information to you. … I look forward to our friendship and shared benefit.” Then he transmitted five files. Four of them, prosecutors said, contained top-secret national defense information. Agents arrested him on the platform moments after the transfer. The same day, he had accepted an offer to return to the NSA. The sting did not catch a man who had been locked out of the building. It caught a man who was about to be let back in, and who used the afternoon to finish a sale he thought was going to Moscow.

That sequence is why the defense’s best argument was also the government’s easiest answer. The secrets did not reach a foreign intelligence service. They reached the FBI. No troop movement changed because of what Dalke emailed. Defense lawyers asked for 14 years and described a traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a history of mental-health crises. Judge Moore said there was no expert report in the file to carry that mitigation, and he said he could have gone longer than the prosecution’s request. He called 262 months mercy. From the bench he said the conduct was blatant, brazen, and deliberate, a betrayal, and “as close to treasonous as you can get.” Treason has a constitutional definition this case did not charge. The judge was describing the moral category, not the statute. The statute was six counts of attempting to transmit classified national defense information to a foreign agent, under the Espionage Act framework that covers attempts. Attempt is the crime when the buyer is a sting. The harm the law is measuring is the decision to move the material, not the passport of the person who received the upload.

Dalke pleaded guilty in October 2023. The plea agreement admitted he transmitted the files with the intent and reason to believe the information would be used to injure the United States and to benefit the Russian Federation. That intent clause is the part of the deal that kept this from being framed as a confused man who thought he was leaking to a journalist. He named the customer as Russian. He priced the product. He showed up. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s statement after sentencing was written for the next person holding a clearance and a debt app. “This defendant, who had sworn an oath to defend our country, believed he was selling classified national security information to a Russian agent, when in fact, he was outing himself to the FBI.” FBI Director Christopher Wray called the sentence a warning to anyone entrusted with national defense information. U.S. Attorney Cole Finegan, speaking outside the Denver courthouse with prosecutors and FBI Special Agent in Charge Mark Michalek, said the term reflected the seriousness of the actions.

A case study the security trainers kept on the syllabus

The judgment, entered in early May 2024, specified 262 months on each of counts one through six, concurrent, plus five years of supervised release on each count, also concurrent, a $600 special assessment, no fine, and no restitution. A final order of forfeiture followed on July 11, 2024. The docket, United States v. Dalke, 1:22-cr-00313 in the District of Colorado, was still being touched by clerical entries into 2026, which is what a long federal sentence looks like after the news cameras leave: not a reversal, a file that stays alive for the Bureau of Prisons and the forfeiture clerk. There is no parole in the federal system. The 262 months are the term, subject to whatever good-time credit the statute allows, not a number a parole board will revisit in year eight because the secrets never crossed an ocean.

On April 29, 2026, two years to the day after the sentencing, the Center for Development of Security Excellence, the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency’s training arm, posted the case as an insider-threat lesson. The point CDSE drew was bureaucratic and correct. Dalke was a new hire. He turned from employee to attempted seller in less than a month. Policies that wait for a mid-career red flag will miss the person who took the job in order to have something to sell. Judge Moore had already said that out loud, treating the short tenure as evidence of a plan rather than as proof of a novice’s panic. Whether that inference is the only one available is a question the plea closed. Dalke admitted the transmissions and the intent. The court was entitled to look at a 25-day career, a denied leave request, a printed set of TS/SCI excerpts, a crypto down payment, and a return offer accepted on the morning of the arrest, and to decide the sequence was not an impulse.

The price is the detail that should bother people who think espionage looks like a movie. Eighty-five thousand dollars for a stack that included defense capabilities and cryptographic material is not a state’s intelligence budget. It is a debt-consolidation number. The $16,499 that actually moved, in cryptocurrency, was a sample fee. Combined with the nearly $84,000 he described owing, the transaction reads as a man selling a clearance at a personal-loan rate and calling it geopolitics in the cover note. Russia did not have to recruit him in a park. He recruited himself, in an encrypted inbox, and the FBI only had to answer. That is cheaper for a foreign service than running an officer, which is why the training community kept the PDF. It is also why a sentence measured in decades, for an attempt that ended in an FBI laptop, is the outcome Congress wrote into the statute. The injury being punished is the breach of the system that assumes a person with TS/SCI access will not shop it.

Compare the file with the public dumps The AEGIS Alliance has covered from the other direction, including WikiLeaks’ Spy Files Russia publication on Moscow’s surveillance apparatus, the Treasury Department’s account of Chinese hackers inside U.S. workstations, and Google’s takedown of a shadow network that used ordinary phones as covert infrastructure. Those are outside intrusions. Dalke was the inside version: a clearance, a resignation, a price list. The Justice Department’s sentencing release is posted by the Office of Public Affairs, and the Associated Press account of Judge Moore’s remarks is here. More of this desk is under Hacker News and US News.