A former employee of the National Security Agency was sentenced to more than 21 years in prison Monday for selling classified material to a person he believed to be a Russian agent. 

The individual that Jareh Sebastian Dalke thought was a Russian official was actually a covert FBI agent. 

Dalke, who pleaded guilty last year to six counts of attempting to transmit national security secrets to a foreign agent, will spend 262 months behind bars for the espionage attempt. 

“This was blatant. It was brazen and, in my mind, it was deliberate. It was a betrayal, and it was as close to treasonous as you can get,” US District Judge Raymond Moore said at the 32-year-old Colorado Springs man’s sentencing hearing, according to the Associated Press. 

Dalke, an Army veteran, was employed as an information systems security designer at the NSA.

He admitted that between August and September of 2022 he used an encrypted email account to transmit excerpts of three documents marked Top Secret//Sensitive Compartmented Information –  the highest level of classification –  to an individual he believed to be a Russian agent in exchange for $16,499 in cryptocurrency. 

Dalke asked for an additional $85,000 for the rest of the national security secrets he possessed through his work for the NSA, according to the Justice Department. 

Dalke told the undercover FBI agent that the material would be of value to Russia and that he would be able to sell more US secrets in the future. 

On Sept. 28, 2023, the former NSA employee then went to Union Station in Denver, where he transferred four classified files to the covert FBI agent and a letter, in Russian, that began, “My friends!” and continued, “I am very happy to finally provide this information to you … I look forward to our friendship and shared benefit. Please let me know if there are desired documents to find and I will try when I return to my main office.” 

Dalke was arrested moments after the file transfer. 

“This defendant, who had sworn an oath to defend our country, believed he was selling classified national security information to a Russian agent, when in fact, he was outing himself to the FBI,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. 

“This sentence demonstrates that that those who seek to betray our country will be held accountable for their crimes,” he added.

The documents Dalke believed he was providing Russia included a threat assessment of the military offensive capabilities of an unnamed country, information about US defense capabilities and details of a US cryptographic program, according to the indictment. 

Dalke indicated that he made the decision to sell the US secrets because he was in massive debt, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and because of his Russian heritage.