Ex-SEAL cops plea in CIA-linked secrecy case

Back in October 1994, when he was a member of the Navy's elite SEAL training team at Coronado, Bruce Schliemann was featured in an official Navy account of his South Pacific exploits.

Three Navy SEALs are undergoing an adventure in the South Pacific as part of the five-member Team American Pride, participating in an international sports event considered the ultimate race, the Raid Gauloises.

The SEALs are Chief Boatswain's Mates Pat Harwood and Rick Holman, and Boatswain's Mate First Class Bruce Schliemann, instructors at the Basic Underwater Demolition and SEALs training facility in Coronado, Calif.

The team will be challenged on a race course in Borneo which has endless jungles, grottos, huge rivers and mountains.

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This race will plunge the groups of men and women into another world for nine days to survive...and survive as a team. All five members must cross the finish line together.

Schliemann survived and later prospered in post-retirement as an operative in the shadowy world of American intelligence contractors, getting a job as a private-sector spook in San Diego. There, according to charges brought this year by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of Virginia, he made a misstep.

In April 2010, Schliemann knowingly downloaded classified information from a classified computer in a secure facility to a personal thumb drive. The defendant then removed the thumb drive from the secure facility and transferred those classified files to the laptop computer that had been issued to him by his employer.

After removing the classified markings, Schliemann then emailed the classified material to employees of another defense contractor located in the Western District of Virginia.

The employees of this second defense contractor subsequently then transmitted the classified information to a number of unauthorized and un-cleared persons in several locations.

When agents of the Homeland Security department and the Defense Criminal Investigative Service began snooping around about the security breach, the ex-SEAL took evasive action, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

Schliemann found out he was being investigated for his actions and consulted with a computer-savvy friend for assistance in “wiping” the hard drive of his laptop computer. After wiping the hard drive, Schliemann physically destroyed the hard drive and thumb drive that held the classified information.

In addition, when approached by agents in September 2010, Schliemann lied about a number of facts, including telling the agents he obtained the classified information by “digging around on the internet.”

The defendant also specifically denied removing the classified information from the secure facility in San Diego.

Schliemann pled guilty to the accusations earlier this month, with sentencing set for March. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the case is the way it's been handled by government prosecutors, who charged the ex-SEAL with only a misdemeanor.

According to a profile on LinkedIn, Schliemann most recently has been working as a program manager at Norfolk, Virginia-based Osen-Hunter Group, LLC. According to its website, the firm is "a global private security company" that works for "government agencies, the military, law enforcement and private sector customers."

Operational support services are said to include “Surveillance, Counter Surveillance and Surveillance Detection,” “Non-conventional Assisted Recovery and Unconventional Assisted Recovery,” as well as "covert method of entry.”

Osen-Hunter's president and chief executive, Daniel Garrett, is a former CIA agent, according to LinkedIn.