A leading US space scientist was sentenced to 13 years in prison Wednesday for selling classified material to a US undercover agent he thought was an Israeli spy, the Justice Department said. Stewart Nozette, 54, entered a guilty plea in September as part of a deal with prosecutors that spared him a possible sentence of life in prison.
His prison term was for charges of attempted espionage, conspiracy to defraud the United States and tax evasion. Nozette agreed to provide classified information from his top-secret work as a government scientist after meeting an undercover FBI agent who persuaded him he was an agent for Mossad, the Israeli secret service.
"Happy to be of assistance," Nozette told the agent, according to a Justice Department account of their first meeting at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in September 2009. In a second case covered by the sentence, Nozette pleaded guilty in January 2009 to fraud and tax charges stemming from more than $265,000 in false claims he submitted to the government.
Trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Nozette had worked at the Pentagon, the Energy Department, the US space agency NASA and the White House Space Council before starting a technology company with government contracts and high-level security clearances. He allegedly told the undercover agent that while he no longer held top-secret clearances, "it's all in my" head, pointing to his head, according to the Justice Department.
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