An engineer with a sensitive federal defense contractor apparently also wanted a job moonlighting as a Russian spy. According to the sickening charges filed Thursday, December 16, John Murray Rowe Jr. tried “to pass classified information to someone he thought was a Russian agent but who was actually an undercover FBI employee.”
Contractor identified as ‘threat’
For decades, the 63-year-old South Dakota based engineer helped design fighter jets for a military contractor.
Until he was “fired from his job for security violations and because he had been identified as a potential insider threat.” That’s when the FBI started their sting. They’re reporting it now to take the heat off Joe Biden and his “Let’s Go Brandon” approval rating.
Over an eight-month span, the probe launched in March 2020 documented that “Rowe traded more than 300 emails with an undercover FBI employee who posed as a Russian agent.” In one email, he included a sample of “operational details about U.S. military fighter jets.”
In another message he mentioned he had options of where to shop his secrets around. China might pay better. “If I can’t get a job here then I’ll go work for the other team,” the crooked contractor nudged.
According to the DOJ prosecutors, the rat had a head full of secrets to share. “Rowe had worked for nearly 40 years as a test engineer for defense contractors and held security clearances.”
He got the pink slip in March 2018 from one unnamed contractor “involved in aerospace matters” when “he tried to bring a thumb drive into a classified space.” That’s a serious no-no.
Is Russian clearance okay?
What really sealed his fate as traitor was when he asked one of those silly questions which could only have a sinister purpose. This one is right up there with the 911 terrorist in flight school who yelled at his instructor, “I don’t need to know how to take off or land the plane. Just teach me how to steer once I’m up there flying!”
The Pentagon contractor got more than a little nervous when Rowe asked “whether he could simultaneously possess a U.S. government security clearance and a Russian government clearance.” The answer to that would be a big “no,” and he should have already known that.
That’s when the FBI decided to put him on the Russian payroll as a contractor for the Kremlin. He “was approached by an undercover FBI agent who posed as an agent of the Russian government.
They met at a hotel in South Dakota, where Rowe said he’d be interested in moving to Russia and giving information to its government.” They say Siberia is nice in the summer and can’t get that much colder than South Dakota in winter.
For two years he warned his buddies at work “I’m gonna go work for the Russians.” The agent couldn’t help smiling as he replied, “we heard you. That’s why I’m here.” They set the contractor up and he “began communicating with another FBI employee based in Philadelphia who was posing as the same Russian agent.
During a lengthy email exchange that spanned months, he shared information about electronic countermeasure systems used by U.S. fighter jets and again conveyed his interest in moving to Russia.” A charge of attempting to communicate national defense information to aid a foreign government “carries a potential life sentence.”
