Special to WorldTribune.com

WASHINGTON — A U.S. Navy linguist in Bahrain, fired after he
violated regulations on the use of classified information, has been accused of
espionage.

Officials said a 55-year-old Arabic translator was arrested in Kuwait
in October during a world tour that followed his dismissal from the
U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. He was then handed over to U.S. military
authorities and returned to the United States for interrogation and
prosecution.

Linguist James Hitselberger, who was based with the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, faces 20 years on two counts of taking national defense information.

The detainee, identified as James Hitselberger, was said to have worked at the Fifth Fleet from September 2011 until April 2012 where he had unlimited access. Officials said the linguist, known as a collector of documents, took home material that included force readiness, deployment, intelligence and travel schedules.

Hitselberger, held without bail in Washington, faces 20 years on two
counts of taking national defense information. Officials said Hitselberger shipped six boxes that included Navy documents to his parents in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

“Multiple forces relied on his expertise in the Arabic language and sent
raw data to him regularly for translation,” an FBI affidavit said. “Through this data, he obtained intimate knowledge of sensitive source operations, including true names and addresses of sources.”

A Navy commander told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that the defendant,
a resident of Wisconsin, could have compromised “everything with respect to
source operations in Iraq.” The commander did not elaborate, but officials
said Hitselberger also served as a private contractor for the U.S. Army in
Iraq from 2004 until 2007.

Hitselberger is said to have represented the difficulties of the U.S.
military and intelligence community with private linguists. They said
Hitselberger, hired by Global Linguist Solutions in June 2011, underwent
several weeks of training and then flew to Bahrain in September to work for
a naval warfare group that specialized in counter-insurgency.

Within weeks of his tour in Bahrain, officials said, Hitselberger, who
previously worked for Titan Corp., a subsidiary of L3 Communications,
dismayed commanders with his failure to respect security regulations. This
included discussing intelligence documents in the navy commissary.

Later, the affadavit said, Hitselberger, who worked in a room that did
not contain cameras, offered U.S. Navy documents to the Hoover Institute of
Stanford University. Eventually, Hoover refused to accept the documents, and
in April Hitselberger was dismissed after he allegedly tried to leave the
naval base with a U.S. intelligence document on the Shi’ite revolt in
Bahrain.

“In light of the FBI investigation of your collection here at Hoover, we
will no longer accept additions to the collection, as we don’t want to risk
receiving more classified material,” the affadavit quoted a Hoover archivist
as saying.