“Dear, what is shown on the screens in the special room?? It is very interesting.”
A civilian employee of the U.S. Air Force has been arrested and charged with sharing highly classified military information on a dating app, according to an announcement from the U.S. Department of Justice on Monday. And it’s pretty clear from the indictment that whoever this man was talking to knew what she was after.
David Franklin Slater, a 63-year-old from Nebraska, was arrested March 2 and charged with transmitting classified material. Slater, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel, held a Top Secret security clearance and worked at U.S. Strategic Command at Offutt Air Force Base until he was arrested on Saturday.
The indictment alleges Slater was using an unnamed foreign dating site where he provided an unnamed woman with extremely sensitive information about the war in Ukraine. Russia first invaded Ukraine in late February 2022 and the messages quoted in the indictment start on March 7 of that year, less than a month after the conflict began. The war has taken the lives of tens of thousands on both sides over the past two years, with no end in sight.
The messages Slater received from the unnamed woman are peppered with loving phrases and indicate she claimed to be from Ukraine. But they also betray the fact that whoever Slater was actually talking to clearly wanted secret information by using pleasantries that included specific requests for details such as:
- “American Intelligence says that already 100% of Russian troops are located on the territory of Ukraine. Do you think this information can be trusted?”
- “Dear, what is shown on the screens in the special room?? It is very interesting.”
- “By the way, you were the first to tell me that NATO members are traveling by train and only now (already evening) this was announced on our news. You are my secret informant love! How were your meetings? Successfully?”
- “Beloved Dave, do NATO and Biden have a secret plan to help us?”
Some of the messages were redacted by U.S. prosecutors in such a way as to not reveal the name of a given country: