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A civilian employee in the U.S. Air Force was charged in federal court with giving classified material about the war in Ukraine to a woman he met on an online dating service, apparently unperturbed by her bizarrely worded requests for information on military targets and Russian capabilities.
David Franklin Slater, 63, of Nebraska, was taken into custody on Saturday on a three-count indictment. He is accused of conspiring to transmit and transmitting classified information relating to the national defense to someone who, claiming to be a single Ukrainian woman, wheedled sensitive information out of him while referring to him as her “secret informant love” and her “secret agent.”
A former U.S. Army officer, Slater retired as a lieutenant colonel before signing up to work with the Air Force as a civilian, according to the Justice Department. He was assigned to U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, where he worked in a classified space and held a top secret security clearance from August 2021 until the following April.