State Department Employee Caught Selling Classified Information to Adversary

The Department of Justice published a press release outlining an investigation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) involving a Department of State (DoS) employee with a Top-Secret security clearance who was selling sensitive and classified information to someone who turned out to be working for the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The employee was arrested a few weeks ago and charged with criminal conspiracy to gather, transmit, or lose national defense information. Here are the highlights of the FBI investigation.

Michael Schena was a DoS South Caribbean Desk Officer working out of the DoS headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 2022, he started corresponding with an individual online and agreed to provide them sensitive and classified information for payments. He used a smartphone to take pictures of documents on his work computer and sent them via text to the individual. Initially, the payments started out small, $500 at a time, but eventually grew to $10,000 in 2024. Schena’s activities caught the attention of the FBI and their review of his iCloud account revealed that he was using an iPhone registered to someone in the PRC to take pictures of sensitive documents from his computer. He also emailed documents from work to his personal email.

The FBI began monitoring his activities and placed him under surveillance. They managed to record him using the iPhone to photograph Secret documents at work, texting them to the PRC contact, then deleting them from the mobile phone. Later that day, Schena left his desk to go home, was stopped and arrested by the FBI outside of his home in Alexandria, VA. This is just one of the many recruitment efforts by agents working for the PRC.