Washington D.C., USA – A former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, Asif Rahman, 34, was sentenced to 37 months in prison on Wednesday for leaking top-secret U.S. intelligence documents detailing Israeli military plans for a retaliatory strike on Iran. The Justice Department announced the sentencing, bringing a conclusion to a case that exposed sensitive national security information.
Rahman, who had served with the CIA since 2016 and possessed a top-secret security clearance, was apprehended by the FBI in Cambodia last November. In January, he pleaded guilty in a federal courthouse in Virginia to two counts of willful retention and transmission of national defense information. He had faced a maximum potential sentence of 20 years.
The leaked documents emerged amidst a period of heightened regional tensions. Iran had launched approximately 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, in retaliation for the targeted killings of senior figures within the Tehran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah militant groups. Israel subsequently responded with a wave of strikes on military targets inside Iran in late October.
According to court filings, on October 17, Rahman illicitly printed two top-secret documents “regarding a United States foreign ally and its planned kinetic actions against a foreign adversary.” He then photographed these documents and employed a computer program to edit the images in an “attempt to conceal their source and delete his activity.”
Rahman proceeded to transmit these classified documents to “multiple individuals he knew were not entitled to receive them” before shredding the originals at his workplace. The leaked materials, which were later circulated on the Telegram messaging app by an account named “Middle East Spectator,” reportedly described Israeli preparations for a potential strike on Iran, though they did not identify specific targets.
The Washington Post reported that the documents, generated by the U.S. National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, detailed Israeli aviation exercises and the movement of munitions at an Israeli airfield. Officials noted that the leak ultimately led Israeli authorities to delay their planned retaliatory strike.
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