Former AF officer gets 3 yrs for spying

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A former Pentagon official was sentenced Friday to three years in prison for espionage after being convicted of giving classified information to a Chinese spy masquerading as an agent for Taiwan.

The sentence imposed on James W. Fondren, 62, of Annandale, was significantly less than the 6 1/2 years sought by prosecutors.

U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton said a lighter sentence is warranted because the information disclosed by Fondren caused little or no harm to U.S. national security.

"This was not the most critical of information," Hilton said. "Most of the information was in the public record anyway."

A jury last year convicted Fondren, who retired from the Air Force as a lieutenant colonel in 1996 and later worked at the Pentagon as a civilian, on three of eight counts, including an espionage count.

Over a period of years, Fondren prepared several dozen "opinion papers" for a friend, Louisiana businessman Tai Shen Kuo, who paid Fondren anywhere from $300 to $1,500 for each paper.

Kuo, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Taiwan, turned out to be a spy for communist China. He pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to nearly 16 years in prison. He was the key prosecution witness at Fondren's trial.

Fondren is the second Pentagon official to be convicted in the Kuo case. Former Defense Department employee Gregg Bergersen pleaded guilty to providing secrets to Kuo and was sentenced to nearly five years in prison.

According to prosecutors, Fondren thought that Kuo was aligned with Taiwan. But Fondren had reason to suspect that Kuo was working for Beijing -- Fondren and Kuo once took a joint trip to China and met Kuo's handler, a government official named Lin Hong.

Fondren, for his part, testified that he never intended to disclose classified information, and he thought everything in his opinion papers came from publicly available information. He is appealing his conviction.

In a brief statement to the judge before he was sentenced, Fondren said, "I should not have helped my friend (Kuo) in his business."

Fondren's lawyer, Asa Hutchinson, said after the hearing that Hilton's sentence reflected the fact that the material in question was not critical to national security.

The sole espionage count on which Fondren was convicted centered on a classified document from November 2007 on talks between the U.S. military and the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

Prosecutor Neil Hammerstrom said that Fondren's claims that he was unaware of Kuo's links to foreign governments are belied by the evidence in the case, including recorded conversations in which Fondren tells Kuo to tell his handlers the information they are seeking from him is too difficult to obtain.

In one conversation, Fondren tells Kuo: "When you see your friend in Taiwan, the general ... let him know, this is hard to explain, but for me to be able to get some of the information means I have to ask questions and people start asking why I want to know that. ... So it is very, very difficult."

Hammerstrom told the judge, "He knowingly committed espionage. He passed information to a spy for the PRC."