James Wilbur Fondren, the deputy director for the Washington Liason Office at the US Pacific Command (PACOM), could face five years in prison and a US$250 000 fine after allegedly providing US Government secrets to Tai Shen Kuo, a friend who was an unregistered agent of the People's Republic of China.  

Fondren left his job as a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Air Force in 1996, and set up a private consulting business in 1998. He began working for Kuo as his sole client, according to a Department of Justice statement.

Fondren then began working at PACOM in 2001, and had access to both classified and unclassified computers on his desk. He had a Top Secret security clearance, and worked in a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. 

According to an affadavit, Fondren supplied classified and unclassified documents taken from computer systems at PANCOM to Kuo, who was in turn paid roughly US$50,000 to pass the information on to an agent working for the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Information provided by Fondren included details of military meetings between the USA and the PRC, along with details of joint military exercises between the two countries.

Kuo was sentenced to 188 months in prison exactly one year ago. Another of his US contacts, Gregg William Bergensen, a former weapons policy analyst at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, received 57 months in prison in March last year, after pleading guilty to disclosing US national defense information to unauthorized recipients.

"How much of this is happening that isn't being reported, or hasn't yet been detected?" asked Rob Grapes, chief technologies at Cloakware, which provides tools to manage administrative passwords and digital rights management software to protect documents. He advocated the use of dual authentication, where two people need to consent to access a document, as a possible means of mitigating document theft from organizations.