DOD engineer gets 18-month sentence for taking classified records home
A Defense Department engineer who held a sensitive job pinpointing adversaries’ technological weak spots was sentenced to a year and a half in prison Tuesday after admitting he removed classified documents from his agency and stored them at his Northern Virginia home.
Gokhan Gun, a dual citizen of Turkey and the United States, was a wireless communications specialist at the Joint Warfare Analysis Center, where he held a top-secret security clearance and devised “system characterizations and mathematical models to identify critical adversary vulnerabilities,” according to the center’s director.
Federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia said Gun began exploiting a security gap at his workplace shortly after being hired, removing printouts of classified documents in plastic bags over several months, typically after most of his colleagues had left for the day.
Gun, 51, was arrested outside his home in Falls Church last year as he prepared to depart for a trip to Mexico. Agents found a backpack outside the residence containing a classified document and a printout of Gun’s intelligence community credentials, along with a notebook in which another classified record had been transcribed. When the FBI searched the home, agents found four more classified documents, court records state.
“He was a new employee who gained a significant position, was paid well, and almost immediately violated his employer’s and the American public’s trust,” Assistant U.S. Attorney John T. Gibbs said in a sentencing memorandum, requesting that the judge impose a three-year prison term and a $145,000 fine, equal to Gun’s annual salary.
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