The Federal Bureau of Investigation said Monday it had arrested a 44-year-old man for allegedly passing classified information to a Philippine government official.
FBI spokesman Frank Scafidi said Joseph Garfield Brown was arrested at Dulles International Airport near Washington as he arrived from the Philippines Sunday.Brown, being held without bail in an Alexandria, Va., prison, is due to appear in U.S. District Court in Alexandria on Wednesday for a preliminary hearing.
If convicted, he faces a prison sentence of 18 years to life, Scafidi said.
Scafidi said Brown, who worked at the time as a martial arts instructor for the Philippine Tourism Bureau in Manila, obtained classified documents from one of his students who worked at the U.S. Embassy there and passed them on to an unidentified official of the Philippine government.
The student, Virginia Baynes, 45, has already pleaded guilty to passing classified information to unauthorized persons and is serving a 41-month sentence at the Lexington, Ky., federal penitentiary. She had agreed to cooperate with federal officials as part of a plea bargain.
Baynes was an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency at the embassy, where she worked as a secretary.
She admitted in February 1991 that she passed two documents to Brown, with whom she had become friendly while learning martial arts.
Scafidi said one document identified potential targets of assassination attempts by local in-sur-gent groups and the other detailed the use of suitcase bombs by Iraqi terrorists.