A married pair of medical doctors with practices at Johns Hopkins Hospital were federally indicted Thursday for secretly try to aid the Russians in their unprovoked war against Ukraine.
The Department of Justice said in a press release that Dr. Anna Gabrielian, 36, and her husband Jamie Lee Henry, a 39-year-old U.S. Army Major with secret-level security clearance (one level below top secret clearance), face eight counts for conspiracy and wrongful disclosure of individually identifiable health information. Henry, who was once interviewed by BuzzFeed about being the first known active-duty Army officer to come out as transgender, worked as a staff internist at Fort Bragg at the time of the alleged espionage.
The doomed scheme began in Aug. 17 this year, the feds say, when the pair tried to pass along confidential health details about U.S. soldiers to someone they believed to be working for the Kremlin.
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In truth, the person was an undercover agent for the FBI.
The fake Kremlin agent met up with Gabrielian throughout August, an indictment says. During their first meeting, Gabrielian allegedly told the agent that she’d tried to contact the Russian embassy by email and by phone, offering her and her husband’s joint abilities to aid the Russian effort. She told the agent she was motivated by a sense of patriotism to the foreign power, “even if it meant being fired or going to jail,” according to the indictment.
The feds say she also offered that her husband, a fellow medical doctor, was a more important resource for Russia since her husband was privy to sensitive details, including how the U.S. military establishes army hospitals in war conditions and insight into previous training provided to the Ukrainian military by the U.S.
In a late August meeting between the three in a Baltimore hotel room, Henry allegedly claimed to have researched volunteering for the Russian army after they invaded Ukraine. Henry expressed a belief that the U.S. was using Ukrainians “as a proxy for their own hatred toward Russia,” the indictment says.
In another meeting, the couple passed along details about a medical condition suffered by a Navy Intelligence employee’s spouse, which Gabrielian said the Russians could “exploit.”
As they spoke with the supposed Kremlin operative, the pair said they were wary of maintaining “plausible deniability” should they be arrested—going so far as to coordinate cover stories and coded language with the agent, the indictment says.
In the event they were caught, Gabrielian requested that her children “have a nice flight to Turkey to go on vacation because I don’t want to end in jail here with my kids being hostages over my head,” the indictment adds.
The two are scheduled to appear before a U.S. District Court in Baltimore, separately, on Thursday. They face a maximum of five years in prison for the conspiracy charge, and another 10 years for each count in which they shared sensitive health data.
