Ex-Pentagon employee sentenced for spying

WASHINGTON, July 11 (UPI) -- A former Pentagon official was sentenced Friday to nearly five years in prison for conspiring to pass U.S. information to someone not entitled to receive it.

In addition to the 57-month prison sentence, Gregg W. Bergersen, 51, of Alexandria, Va., was sentenced to three years of probation for his role in the espionage case, the U.S. Justice Department said in a news release. Bergersen pleaded guilty to conspiracy March 31 after being arrested by federal authorities in February.

"Mr. Bergersen predicted he would go to jail if anyone discovered he was unlawfully providing classified information to a foreign government. We did. He is," said U.S. Attorney Chuck Rosenberg.

Bergersen was a weapons system policy analyst at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency within the Defense Department when he passed along defense information to Tai Shen Kuo, a naturalized U.S. citizen and a New Orleans businessman. Much of the information he passed along between March 2007 to February 2008 pertained to U.S. military sales to Taiwan and was classified at the Secret level.

Kuo pleaded guilty to conspiracy to deliver national defense information to a foreign government, namely, China, the Justice Department said. He is scheduled to be sentenced Aug. 8.