Classified Material

A Soviet employee of the United Nations was ordered held without bail today on an espionage charge after a federal prosecutor argued that the man was likely to flee the country if released. Gennadiy Fedorovich Zakharov, a U.N. scientific affairs officer suspected of being a member of the Soviet secret police, was arrested Saturday night as he allegedly tried to buy classified information from an FBI informant at a subway station in the borough of Queens.

FT. MEADE, Md. - Army Pfc. Bradley Manning pleaded guilty Thursday to sending huge digital archives of secret U.S. military and diplomatic records to the WikiLeaks website, saying he was motivated by a U.S. foreign policy "obsessed with killing and capturing people. " Manning, 25, sat erect in dress blues beside his lawyers in a military courtroom and read aloud for more than an hour - slowly but sometimes stumbling over his words - from a 35-page, handwritten statement that described his personal angst over America's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

An Arabic linguist with top security clearance at the terrorist detention camp on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had gone to Egypt with reams of classified and secret documents, federal authorities said Wednesday. Ahmed Fathy Mehalba was stopped last month at Boston's Logan International Airport and found to be carrying 132 computer disks in his luggage.

WASHINGTON -- There is no evidence that Mike Vickers, the Pentagon's undersecretary for intelligence, disclosed classified information when he spoke to the makers of the film "Zero Dark Thirty," the Pentagon's chief spokesman said Tuesday. “There is a pending inspector general investigation on the question of whether Mr. Vickers provided classified information in an interview with the filmmakers of 'Zero Dark Thirty,' ” Pentagon spokesman George Little said. When the Department of Defense reviewed a transcript of Vickers' conversation with the filmmakers after it was requested under the Freedom of Information Act, Little said, none of the material was deemed to be classified.

When Army Capt. James Joseph Yee goes to a military court hearing here next week, the government may find itself faced with the same accusation it has leveled against the Muslim chaplain who ministered to detainees at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba: Mishandling classified material.

Sandy Berger, a national security advisor to President Clinton, was voluntarily disbarred from the practice of law by the D.C. Court of Appeals. Berger agreed last month to relinquish his law license to the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, a part of the D.C. Bar, rather than submit to an investigation by the bar's counsel of his removal of classified documents from the National Archives. A three-member panel of the D.C. appellate court approved the plan.

A federal judge put in place temporary rules Tuesday to prevent the leak of classified information in the case of alleged Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla. While agreeing to rules proposed by prosecutors, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said she would consider suggestions from defense lawyers, who complained that the restrictions would hurt their ability to defend clients charged with supporting terrorism overseas.

A chief petty officer at the Navy's Point Loma submarine base was sentenced Tuesday to four years and one month in prison for mishandling classified materials while he was photography chief on the La Jolla, a nuclear submarine based in San Diego. Chief Petty Officer David Fleming, 35, also was demoted to the lowest rank of E-1 and dishonorably discharged from the Navy.

The Army used a megaphone to announce the arrest of Capt. James Yee as a spying suspect last October. It dismissed the criminal case with a whisper last Friday night, its timing designed to minimize the effect of the news. This week, foolishly digging itself a deeper hole, the Army issued a written reprimand to Yee, a Muslim chaplain who ministered to prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The judge in the Iran-Contra case today ruled that he needed more time to study independent counsel Lawrence E. Walsh's plan to prevent unauthorized disclosure of 150,000 pages of classified documents. U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell denied Walsh's motion for expedited consideration of the proposed protective order, saying it "appears to be far too complex, lacks definite time restrictions and creates undue obstacles to the fair and expeditious disposition of this case."

  Hackers briefly took down the public website of the CIA early Wednesday evening, but U.S. officials said no sensitive or classified material was compromised. The CIA declined to confirm the cause of the apparent crash, which kept the site from loading for at least an hour. "We are looking into these reports," said spokesman Preston Golson. A group calling itself LulzSec took responsibility for the site crash in a Twitter message at around 6 p.m. "Tango down — cia.gov — for the lulz.

A senior Al Qaeda military commander strongly warned Khalid Shaikh Mohammed not to kill Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002, cautioning him "it would not be wise to murder Pearl" and that he should "be returned back to one of the previous groups who held him, or freed. " But Mohammed told his U.S. interrogators at Guantanamo Bay that he cut off Pearl's head anyway, according to U.S. military documents posted on the Internet on Monday by WikiLeaks. Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of the Sept.

A former CIA officer was arrested Thursday on charges of illegally disclosing classified material and obstructing justice after authorities said he assisted a newspaper reporter and book author with information about highly classified covert operations. Jeffrey A. Sterling, who was terminated by the CIA after nearly nine years and who then sued alleging racial discrimination, was arrested in St. Louis after a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed in Alexandria, Va., charging him with 10 counts, including the "unlawful disclosure of national defense information.

Predictably, this week's release of thousands of classified documents by WikiLeaks — which also provided them to the New York Times, Germany's Der Spiegel and the Guardian in London — has fired up those who believe secrecy fosters national security and who shudder at the idea of journalists rummaging through classified material. Typical was the comment from tiresome Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). WikiLeaks, he maintained, is armed with "an ideological agenda implacably hostile to our military and the most basic requirements of our national security."

Sandy Berger, a national security advisor to President Clinton, was voluntarily disbarred from the practice of law by the D.C. Court of Appeals. Berger agreed last month to relinquish his law license to the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility, a part of the D.C. Bar, rather than submit to an investigation by the bar's counsel of his removal of classified documents from the National Archives. A three-member panel of the D.C. appellate court approved the plan.

A federal judge put in place temporary rules Tuesday to prevent the leak of classified information in the case of alleged Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla. While agreeing to rules proposed by prosecutors, U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke said she would consider suggestions from defense lawyers, who complained that the restrictions would hurt their ability to defend clients charged with supporting terrorism overseas.

A laptop computer containing top-secret information vanished from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research more than a week ago, and the FBI is investigating whether it was stolen, a senior State Department official said. The laptop's disappearance from a supposedly secure conference room at the department has set off an intense effort to recover the computer and a search for suspects, including contractors who have been renovating the area, the official said.

Newly declassified U.S. government documents establish a link between former Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet and two men convicted in the September 1976 assassination in Washington of Chile's onetime top diplomat. The documents state that Pinochet telephoned Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner to ask that he provide passports to two agents of Chile's secret police, who ultimately used Chilean passports to enter the United States.

Former national security advisor Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger withdrew Tuesday as an advisor to the presidential campaign of Sen. John F. Kerry after the disclosure that he was being investigated for the mishandling of classified documents from his years in the Clinton administration.

The Army used a megaphone to announce the arrest of Capt. James Yee as a spying suspect last October. It dismissed the criminal case with a whisper last Friday night, its timing designed to minimize the effect of the news. This week, foolishly digging itself a deeper hole, the Army issued a written reprimand to Yee, a Muslim chaplain who ministered to prisoners at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.