WASHINGTON: A US scientist has been arrested on charges of attempting to pass classified information to an FBI agent posing as an Israeli intelligence officer.

Stewart David Nozette, 52, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, is facing charges of attempting to spy for Israel and allegedly seeking Israeli citizenship. During his career, Nozette has worked at the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, Virginia, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, NASA, the Department of Energy (DOE) and the Pentagon.

He allegedly told the FBI agent that he had a top security clearance until 2006 and could remember details that would be of use to Israel. The charges relate only to the sting, but the FBI document notes that Nozette was employed as a technical consultant for Israel Aerospace Industries, an aerospace company, between 1998 and 2008. “Approximately once a month, representatives of the aerospace company proposed questions, or taskings, to Nozette,” the document says. “Nozette answered the aerospace company’s questions and, in return, Nozette received regular payments from the company, totaling $225,000.” It “does not allege that the Government of Israel or anyone acting on its behalf committed any offense under the laws of the United States.”

When the FBI first approached him and asked him if he wanted to work for Mossad, Nozette replied, according to CNN: “I thought I was working for you already; I thought the company I was working with was just a front for Mossad.”

The sting was conducted after Nozette took what the FBI perceived to be a suspicious trip abroad. The complaint alleges that Nozette traveled to a country that was not Israel — “foreign country A” — in January of this year carrying two computer thumb drives and returned without them.

Prior to that journey, Nozette allegedly told a colleague that should he face criminal charges on an unrelated matter, he could flee to Israel or to “foreign county A.”

The FBI says there has been no breach by Israel, which has agreed not to spy on its ally.

Nozette has been charged with “attempted espionage for knowingly and willfully attempting to communicate, deliver and transmit classified information relating to the national defense of the US to an individual that Nozette believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer,” the US Department of Justice said. In September, the FBI twice left envelopes in a mailbox, filled with a total of $11,000 in cash and a list of questions for Nozette to answer, the agent wrote. Nozette picked up the envelopes and returned the ones that “contained information classified as both top secret and secret that concerned US satellites, early warning systems, means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack, communications intelligence information, and major elements of defense strategy,” prosecutors and FBI officials said.

The charge carries a maximum sentence of life in prison. Nozette stopped working for the US government in 2006. Nozette appeared Tuesday in the U.S. District Court in Washington.

At DOE, Nozette held a special security clearance equivalent to the Defense Department’s top secret and “critical nuclear weapon design information” clearances. DOE clearances apply to access to information specifically relating to atomic or nuclear-related materials. Nozette’s most sensitive position appears to have been as a contractor working from 2000 to 2006 for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The charges describe the agency’s mission as maintaining “the technological superiority of the US military and to prevent technological surprise from harming our national security.”

He developed the Clementine bi-static radar experiment that is credited with discovering water on the south pole of the moon. The secrets he was trying to sell, however, were not about moon water — but rather defense strategies and satellite details which he had access to when he worked at the Energy Department’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he designed highly advanced technology, from approximately 1990 to 1999.