Two U.S. Army soldiers in Washington State and a former soldier were arrested on Thursday on bribery and theft charges, accused in separate federal indictments of conspiring to obtain and sell sensitive government information, the Justice Department said.
The defendants were identified as First Lt. Li Tian, a health services administrator; Sgt. Jian Zhao, a supply sergeant assigned to the 17th Field Artillery Brigade; and Ruoyu Duan, of Hillsboro, Ore. who served in the Army from 2013 to 2017. The two soldiers were stationed at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state.
One indictment filed on Wednesday in the U.S. District Court of Oregon accused Lieutenant Tian of conspiring with Mr. Duan, the former soldier, from November 2021 through December of last year to secretly gather classified information about the Army’s operations, including technical manuals.
Lieutenant Tian gathered sensitive information relating to the Bradley and Stryker armored vehicles used by the Army and sent that information to Mr. Duan in exchange for money, federal prosecutors said.
Sergeant Zhao was accused in a separate indictment, filed in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington on Wednesday, of conspiring to obtain and sell nearly two dozen hard drives, some marked “SECRET” and “TOP SECRET,” to buyers in China. The indictment says that Sergeant Zhao accepted payments totaling at least $15,000 starting in about July 2024.
“The defendants arrested today are accused of betraying our country, actively working to weaken America’s defense capabilities and empowering our adversaries in China,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a news release announcing the arrests. “They will face swift, severe and comprehensive justice.”
It was not immediately clear if any of the defendants had lawyers.
Lieutenant Tian and Mr. Duan were charged with conspiracy to commit an offense against the United States, bribery of a public official and theft of government property. Sergeant Zhao was charged with conspiracy to gather national defense information, bribery of a public official and theft of government property.
In one encrypted exchange from October, Sergeant Zhao told an unnamed co-conspirator that he had the “good stuff,” according to his indictment.
“Very sensitive document. Super difficult to get,” he said, referring to a document about HIMARS, a truck-mounted multiple-rocket launcher. He priced the file at $3,000. He haggled with a buyer over the price of two documents before settling on $6,500.
According to the Justice Department, those documents contained unclassified but sensitive information about rocket systems and military readiness in the event of an armed conflict with China. In other instances, he sold hard drives marked “TOP SECRET” or “SECRET” to buyers in China, federal prosecutors said. The specific contents of those hard drives were not disclosed in the indictment.
“These arrests underscore the persistent and increasing foreign intelligence threat facing our Army and nation,” Brig. Gen. Rhett R. Cox, the commanding general of the Army Counterintelligence Command, said in the news release.
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