The trial of a Navy chief petty officer accused of espionage is underway, kicking off in San Diego on Tuesday, court docket paperwork and repair officers confirmed.
Chief Petty Officer Bryce Steven Pedicini, a fireplace controlman, is alleged to have dedicated espionage aboard the destroyer USS Higgins in Virginia and whereas in Japan, and was charged in January with the wrongful communication of protection data and disobeying lawful orders. The court-martial is ready to run via April 19, based on the Navy’s on-line docket.
Cmdr. Arlo Abrahamson, a spokesman for the Navy’s Pacific Fleet, famous to Army.com in an e mail that Pedicini “has solely navy counsel and has elected trial by a choose.”
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Data supplied by the Navy in February confirmed that Pedicini was final assigned to the Higgins, which is homeported in Japan, however has been in pre-trial confinement since Might.
Pedicini is accused of delivering two units of categorised nationwide protection paperwork — that are named solely as “Article 1112” and “Article 1223” — to “a citizen and worker of a overseas authorities” between November 2022 and February 2023 in Hampton Roads, Virginia, based on the charging paperwork.
The charging paperwork allege Pedicini broke up the 2 paperwork and delivered them each over a number of cases.
The costs additionally allege Pedicini supplied “photographs of a [secret-level classification] pc display screen to a citizen and worker of a overseas authorities” in mid-Might in Yokosuka, the identical Japanese metropolis that hosts the Navy base and the Higgins.
Neither the paperwork nor Navy officers have supplied the id of the nation that Pedicini is alleged to have spied for, however the cost sheet notes that the chief petty officer had “purpose to imagine that it might be used to the damage of america and the benefit of a overseas nation.”
Pedicini is at the very least the third sailor in a few yr to face espionage-related fees — although the primary in current reminiscence to be tried by the navy and never civilian courts.
In January, Petty Officer Second Class Wenheng Zhao — who glided by the identify Thomas Zhao — was sentenced to only over two years in federal jail for transmitting delicate U.S. navy data to a Chinese language intelligence officer. Zhao had despatched greater than 50 technical and mechanical manuals for varied techniques of the USS Essex and related ships to his Chinese language handlers, court docket paperwork mentioned.
Zhao was arrested and charged in 2023 alongside Jinchao Wei, a machinist’s mate who was additionally assigned to the Essex in San Diego and charged with a number of counts of conspiring and sending protection data to a overseas citizen.
Wei’s trial is at present set to start in December, based on court docket information.
Each Wei and Zhao are alleged to have obtained hundreds of {dollars} for his or her alleged actions — court docket information for Wei even notice that the sailor “boasted that whereas different U.S. Navy sailors had been driving cabs to make more money, all he needed to do was leak secrets and techniques” — however no such data has been publicly revealed in Pedicini’s case.
