Veteran State Department Employee from India Arrested for Stealing Top-Secret Information
by Nick R. Hamilton
An Indian immigrant who has worked for the State Department for over 20 years has been arrested for stealing classified documents at the highest level.
Many will argue that the turn of events vindicates President Donald Trump’s push to tighten immigration and visas for foreign workers.
Ashley Tellis, a 64-year-old naturalized U.S. citizen from Mumbai with a top-secret security clearance, was charged with unlawfully retaining classified defense information.
He was charged after a raid of his Virginia home that uncovered a trove of top-secret files, Newsmax reported.
A distinguished expert on India and South Asian affairs, Tellis has been a State Department adviser since 2001 and “played a key role in the US-India civil nuclear deal talks in the mid-2000s,” says the Hindustan Times.
According to prosecutors, Tellis met with Chinese officials repeatedly over the past three years and was caught stashing files from secure government sites over the past month.
On September 25, surveillance cameras at the State Department’s Harry S. Truman Building in Washington D.C. captured Tellis printing hundreds of pages from a classified system, including a 1,288-page file concerning U.S. Air Force tactics, the Hindustan Times reports.
Apparently trying to cover his tracks, he changed the file’s name to “Econ Reform” before printing selected pages and then deleting the file.
On October 10, surveillance cameras from a secure facility at the Pentagon’s Mark Center in Alexandria, Virginia, caught Tellis hiding top secret information inside notepads before placing them in his briefcase and leaving.