Under the title "Disclosed Dangerous Secrets.. Harsh Penalty for Hezbollah Spy," Sky News reported on the ruling issued by Washington against translator Maryam Thompson. The site noted that a court in the United States sentenced the American translator, who had worked with the Pentagon, to 23 years in prison after she admitted to leaking the names of U.S. military informants in Iraq to a man connected to Hezbollah following the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani in a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad.
The U.S. Department of State stated that 62-year-old Maryam Thompson had reached a plea agreement with the prosecution in which she acknowledged her guilt regarding the charges against her. The statement added that Thompson confessed to supplying a Lebanese man with classified military information, knowing he would relay it to Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that the United States considers a "terrorist organization."
The statement quoted John Demers, the official overseeing national security affairs at the U.S. State Department, saying that Thompson's sentence "reflects the seriousness of her actions: she betrayed the trust of the American people, the sources she endangered, and the soldiers she worked with."
Court documents revealed that Thompson was working as an interpreter at a military base overseas when, in 2017, she developed a relationship through a video app with a man who disclosed to her his ties to Hezbollah, and over time, she became emotionally interested in him.
In December 2019, this translator was assigned to the U.S. Special Forces in Erbil, the capital of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, at a time when the United States began targeting Iranian-backed militias. These strikes peaked on January 3 when a U.S. drone killed Qassem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, near Baghdad Airport.
Shortly after Soleimani's assassination, the Lebanese man asked his American girlfriend for the names of informants who may have assisted the United States in the assassination of Soleimani. Thompson then reviewed files of several U.S. military informants in Iraq and provided her friend with the names of at least eight of them, along with information about U.S. tactics. The FBI arrested her on February 27, 2020.
