Former Army Green Beret pleads guilty to divulging military secrets to Russia
Matthew Barakat, The Associated Press
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A former Army Green Beret pleaded guilty Wednesday to divulging military secrets to Russia about his Special Forces unit’s activities in former Soviet republics.
Peter Rafael Dzibinski Debbins, 45, of Gainesville, Virginia, pleaded guilty to a charge under the federal Espionage Act at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.
He faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced in February.
Debbins, a Minnesota native, had a 15-year relationship with Russian intelligence, dating back to 1996 when he was an ROTC student at the University of Minnesota and on a visit to Russia for an independent study program gave a handler there the names of four Catholic nuns he had visited, according to the charges against him. Shortly thereafter, Russian agents assigned him a code name, “Ikar Lesnikov.”
Debbins told Russian intelligence he considered himself a “son of Russia,” and “thought that the United States was too dominant in the world and needed to be cut down to size,” according to the indictment. He even offered to take a polygraph test to prove his Russian loyalty when one handler accused him of being a double agent for the U.S.
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/11/18/former-army-green-beret-pleads-guilty-to-divulging-military-secrets-to-russia/
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