US Contractor Pleads Guilty to Spying for Ethiopia
A former United States government contractor has pleaded guilty to spying for Ethiopia, admitting that he passed highly classified defence information to senior Ethiopian officials over more than two years.
Abraham Teklu Lemma, 53, of Maryland, pleaded guilty on 3 November to conspiracy to transmit national defense information to a foreign government, the Justice Department said. Under a plea agreement that still requires the court’s acceptance, he has agreed to a prison term of between 120 and 262 months — 10 years to 21 years and 10 months. Sentencing is set for 14 April 2027.
Lemma, a naturalised US citizen, worked as an information technology contractor at the National Reconnaissance Office, the US Department of State and the US Department of Justice. He held a Top Secret security clearance, and prosecutors say much of the material he handled was classified up to the Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information level.
A trusted role, prosecutors say
According to court documents, Lemma conspired with senior Ethiopian government officials from 2021 until his arrest in August 2023 to collect and transmit dozens of highly classified documents, notes, materials and photographs. His contacts included officials in Ethiopia’s political, military and intelligence branches, the Justice Department said.
The investigation was conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation‘s Washington Field Office. Prosecutors say Lemma copied information from at least 133 intelligence reports without need-to-know authorisation, downloaded more than 100 documents, burned them to discs and removed their classification markings.
Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg said Lemma “betrayed the United States to an extraordinary degree” by using his IT access to remove classified national defense information from secure facilities and pass it on.
US Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Ferris Pirro said he “exploited a position of trust to provide highly classified US government information to a foreign government”.
How the material moved
Prosecutors say Lemma began transmitting information to Ethiopian officials through an encrypted messaging app in August and September 2022. The files included documents, photographs, notes and maps, much of it relating to Ethiopia, and his contacts asked him for details about command centres, logistics centres and military compounds.
The Register reported that prosecutors also accused Lemma of storing copies of classified files on his own storage drives, which Ethiopian officials are said to have accessed remotely numerous times between April and June 2023.
The case is a reminder of how much damage an insider with broad system access can do, even without removing a physical file from a building. Lemma’s IT work gave him access across departments, and prosecutors say he used authority to move files between classified systems to gather material he had no legitimate need to see.
What officials say it was used for
The Justice Department said much of the information concerned an armed conflict in Ethiopia, and that Ethiopian officials subsequently used the information in military operations. An FBI counterintelligence official, Roman Rozhavsky, said Lemma admitted that the intelligence was used in military operations.
“Despite swearing an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States, Abraham Lemma betrayed our country by committing espionage on behalf of the Ethiopian government,” Rozhavsky said.
The department’s public statement does not name the specific armed groups involved or describe the individual military operations, and it does not say whether anyone was killed as a result of the breach.
What happens next
Lemma initially pleaded not guilty after his arrest in August 2023, and the case proceeded for more than three years before Tuesday’s plea. The agreed sentencing range is not yet final: a judge must accept the plea agreement, and the court will impose the sentence at the April hearing.
The case also raises a broader national security question for Washington. Intelligence agencies have spent years tightening controls on who can copy, download and transfer classified material, particularly after earlier insider cases. Prosecutors in Lemma’s case argue that the controls failed at the level of individual access — a contractor with a clearance and a plausible technical role was able to collect material across agencies and send it abroad.
For Ethiopia, the case is likely to be politically sensitive. The Ethiopian government has not publicly commented on the guilty plea in the reporting reviewed, and the Justice Department‘s statement does not name the Ethiopian officials involved. The plea itself, however, is now a matter of public record in a US federal court, and the sentencing hearing in April will set the final term.
Until then, Lemma remains subject to the court’s supervision, and the agreed range gives the judge considerable room to weigh the scale of the disclosure, the length of the conspiracy and the defendant’s cooperation against the seriousness of passing top-secret material to a foreign government.
