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A defence contractor and former US Army officer has been arrested and charged with giving his younger Chinese lover secret information about existing war plans and American nuclear weapons.
Benjamin Pierce Bishop, 59, who worked in intelligence in Hawaii, appeared in court to face one count of communicating national defence information to a person not entitled to receive it and one count of unlawfully retaining national defence documents and plans.
According to the complaint filed in Honolulu, Bishop met the woman at a conference on international military defence issues and passed her the information by email after beginning a romantic relationship with her.
US Attorney Florence Nakakuni said Bishop had been charged with giving defence secrets to his Chinese lover
The complaint said the 27-year-old woman 'may have been at the conference in order to target individuals such as Bishop', who had top secret security clearance since 2002.
Bishop was arrested on Friday at Pacific Command headquarters at Camp H.M. Smith in Hawaii and appeared in court yesterday.
Authorities did not say when the conference took place but said the Chinese woman, whose identity has not been released, was in the US on a student visa at the time.
She allegedly began an intimate relationship with Bishop in June 2011, and the authorities say he passed on the information to her in an email in May, and also in a phone call in September, when he told the woman about the deployment of US strategic nuclear systems and about the ability of the US to detect other nations' low- and medium-range ballistic missiles.
Bishop is accused of hiding the relationship from the government even though his position and security clearance requires him to report contact with foreign nationals.
Authorities conducting a covert search of Bishop's home in the Honolulu suburb of Kapolei found 12 individual documents marked 'secret' although he was not authorised to keep classified papers at home, court documents said.
Bishop's home in Kapolei, Hawaii, where authorities found secret documents he was not supposed to have
The woman asked Bishop last month what western countries knew about 'the operation of a particular naval asset of People's Republic of China', the complaint said, though the topic fell outside Bishop's regular work assignments.
Bishop researched the issued using open source records and was observed collecting and reviewing classified information on the topic, according to the complaint.
At one point, when he travelled to the UK to visit the woman, Bishop tried to hide her identify on a request to leave for travel form 'by slightly changing her given name to a masculine form of the same name and by adding a letter to the surname,' according to an FBI agent's affidavit.
US Magistrate Judge Richard Puglisi conditionally appointed Bishop an attorney after hearing arguments that his finances weren't sufficient to cover the costs of defending himself.
The complaint filed in Honolulu said that a covert search of Bishop's home found 12 individual documents marked 'secret' inside
Bishop's court-appointed attorney Birney Bervar, said Bishop was a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserve.
He said: 'Colonel Bishop has served this country for 29 years. He would never do anything to harm the United States.'
Bart DaSilva, a neighbour of Bishop's, said the man lived alone and was initially friendly when he moved in about three years ago.
DaSilva said Bishop once brought over a woman and a girl he said were his wife and daughter from Thailand.
But he said he never saw Bishop with other visitors, and noticed that Bishop increasingly began to keep to himself.
'I kind of felt: "What did we do?"' DaSilva said. 'It was almost like he switched off.'
No-one was available for comment at Bishop's brown, two-storey home in a hilly neighbourhood overlooking Pearl Harbor and downtown Honolulu.
Bishop, who faces a maximum potential sentence of 20 years in prison if convicted, was scheduled to appear in court this Friday for a hearing on whether he will remain in detention during the case. A preliminary hearing was scheduled for April 1
American defence contractor Benjamin Pierce Bishop 'gave nuclear secrets' to younger Chinese lover | Mail Online
