A former Energy Department employee has been indicted on charges he tried to steal nuclear weapons secrets from his former colleagues by hacking into their computers with the intention to sell the secrets to the Chinese government, according to court documents and people familiar with the matter.
Charles Eccleston was terminated from his job at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2010, according to the Justice Department. Previously, he’d worked at the Energy Department.
Charles Harvey Eccleston, a former employee at the department and at the independent Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), was arrested after an undercover FBI operation.
The sting was launched after Eccleston offered to provide to a foreign government classified information he claimed could be obtained from the Energy Department, according to the indictment.
Eccleston, 62, a U.S. citizen who had been living in the Philippines since 2011, was “terminated” from his job at the NRC the previous year, according to a statement from the Justice Department.
In January, the statement said, he targeted more than 80 Energy Department employees with e-mails containing malicious software that, if activated, could damage computers and extract sensitive information.
In 2013, Eccleston told an FBI undercover employee that he had tried to sell information to China and Venezuela “but was not granted access to officials of these countries,” according an FBI agent’s affidavit that was unsealed in connection with the case.
