A former U.S. Army intelligence analyst with top secret security clearance was sentenced to seven years in prison on Wednesday for selling classified military information to a foreign national who was most likely connected to the Chinese government, federal prosecutors said.
The analyst, Sgt. Korbein Schultz, 25, sent at least 92 sensitive documents to a conspirator, who was not named, in a period of less than two years, the authorities said. The material included technical manuals for intercontinental ballistic missile systems and information on Chinese military tactics, they said.
Mr. Schultz, of Wills Point, Texas, received $42,000 in exchange for the information, according to the Justice Department.
He pleaded guilty last August to six criminal counts that included conspiracy to obtain and transmit national defense data, bribery of a public official and exporting technical defense data. The counts all together could have brought a sentence of up to 65 years in prison.
Mr. Schultz will also be required to complete three years of supervised release as part of his sentence, which was handed down in federal court in Nashville.
“Protecting classified information is paramount to our national security, and this sentencing reflects the ramifications when there is a breach of that trust,” Brig. Gen. Rhett R. Cox, the commanding general of the Army Counterintelligence Command, said in a statement on Wednesday. “This soldier’s actions put Army personnel at risk, placing individual gain above personal honor.”
Mary Kathryn Harcombe, a federal public defender who represented Mr. Schultz, declined to comment on the sentence.
Mr. Schultz, who was assigned to the 506th Infantry Battalion, was arrested in March 2024 at Fort Campbell in Kentucky.
Prosecutors said that he had shared his Army unit’s operational order with the conspirator before the unit was deployed to Eastern Europe to support NATO operations. The conspirator contacted him shortly after he had received his top secret security clearance, they said.
He also supplied the person with details on U.S. military exercises in South Korea and the Philippines, in addition to lessons learned by the U.S. Army from the Ukraine-Russia war that are applicable to Taiwan’s defense, the authorities said.
Military officials said that Mr. Schultz had given his contact in China technical manuals for the HH-60 helicopter and the F-22A fighter aircraft, along with a tactical playbook on how to counter unmanned aerial systems in large-scale combat operations.
According to the indictment, Mr. Schultz unsuccessfully tried to recruit another Army intelligence officer to help him obtain more sensitive documents for the conspirator, who reportedly lived in Hong Kong and worked for a geopolitical consulting firm overseas.
