A federal grand jury on Friday indicted a Navy employee for attempting to unlawfully handover drawings of the Navy’s first ship of a new class of aircraft carriers, charges that arose from an FBI sting operation in which the suspect was told the documents would be going to the Egyptian government.
Mostafa Ahmed Awwad, 35, of Yorktown, Va., faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on two counts of attempting to export defense articles and technical data about the future USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN-78), the Justice Department said. The Ford is the first of a new class of carriers of the same name being built by Huntington Ingalls Industries [HII] in Newport News, Va.
An FBI affidavit says Awwad, a civilian, started working for the Navy as an engineer at nuclear facility at Norfolk Naval Shipyard in February 2014.
In September, an Arabic speaking undercover FBI agent posing as an Egyptian intelligence officer reached out to Awwad asking for a meeting, to which the suspect readily agreed to do the following day, the Justice Department said.
“During the meeting Awwad claimed it was his intention to utilize his position of trust with the U.S. Navy to obtain military technology for use by the Egyptian government, including but not limited to, the designs of the USS Gerald Ford nuclear aircraft carrier,” the Justice Department said.
“Awwad agreed to conduct clandestine communications with the undercover FBI agent by email and unattributable telephones and to conduct ‘dead drops’ in a concealed location in the park,” the Justice Department said.
The undercover agent met with Awwad on Oct. 9 in a hotel, where the suspect outlined a plan to get around the Navy’s computer security by installing software that would allow him to copy sensitive documents downloaded from the Navy Nuclear Propulsion Information system, the Justice Department said.
Awwad also asked the agent for $1,500 to buy a pinhole camera to wear around the shipyard and said he would provide photos for a fake passport to use for undetected travel to Egypt, the Justice Department said. Later that month Awwad retrieved $3,000 from a dead drop site in a park while leaving behind a terabyte external hard drive and two passport photos, the Justice Department said.
In late November, Awwad was seen entering his office at the shipyard with a cardboard tube, from which he took out documents of an aircraft carrier schematics and photographed them, the Justice Department said.