U.S. Contractor Admits Feeding Top-Secret Intelligence to Ethiopia’s War
A former U.S. government contractor admitted on Tuesday, November 3, that he stole top-secret intelligence from American systems and delivered it to senior Ethiopian officials who used the material in military operations.
Abraham Teklu Lemma of Maryland pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiring to transmit national defense information to a foreign government. The admission turns a 2023 espionage prosecution into a documented account of how officials in Addis Ababa obtained classified U.S. reporting during one of Africa’s deadliest wars.
The U.S. Justice Department said Lemma held a Top Secret security clearance while working as an information-technology contractor at the State Department, Justice Department and National Reconnaissance Office. From 2021 until his arrest in August 2023, prosecutors said, he removed dozens of documents, notes, photographs and other materials classified as high as Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information.
Photograph: U.S. State Department headquarters, March 2, 2024, by the U.S. Department of State · public domain
The government’s case does not describe an abstract leak. It says senior Ethiopian political, military and intelligence officials received the material, much of it concerning armed conflict inside Ethiopia. FBI counterintelligence official Roman Rozhavsky said Lemma admitted that Ethiopian officials then used the intelligence in military operations.
A leak built for the battlefield
Lemma used his access as an administrator to enter classified repositories, copy electronic files and carry handwritten notes out of secure facilities, according to the plea record. Prosecutors said he encouraged Ethiopian contacts to strike paramilitary forces fighting the federal government.
In a December 2021 message, Lemma wrote: “We have to finish these people once and for all.” Later that day, after sending more information, he told the contact: “Please send Dro[nes].”
Those messages place the breach inside Ethiopia’s 2020–2022 war between the federal government and Tigrayan forces, not beside it. The conflict killed hundreds of thousands through violence, hunger and the collapse of health services. Eritrean troops fought alongside Ethiopia’s federal forces, while a communications blackout made satellite imagery one of the few reliable ways to track operations.
Photograph: Aftermath of an airstrike in Mekelle, Ethiopia, November 16, 2020, by Voice of America · public domain
The Associated Press reported that the Justice Department has not identified the specific operations aided by Lemma’s intelligence or said whether the information caused any deaths. Ethiopia’s government has not publicly responded to the guilty plea. Those absences matter: the plea establishes transfer and military use, but it does not establish which unit received which report, which target followed, or who may have been harmed.
Washington’s silence now has a record
The case exposes more than one contractor’s crime. Washington sanctioned Ethiopian and Eritrean figures and publicly warned all parties over abuses during the Tigray war, yet one of its own cleared workers was simultaneously feeding battlefield intelligence to officials in Addis Ababa.
That contradiction does not prove official U.S. support for the transfer. Prosecutors describe Lemma as acting illegally and concealing his conduct. But it does show how a security system spanning three powerful agencies failed for more than two years while classified material moved into an active war.
The breach also complicates easy narratives about Ethiopia’s sovereignty. Addis Ababa has long rejected foreign pressure over its internal conflicts, while Western governments have alternated between partnership, sanctions and humanitarian alarm. Here, Ethiopian officials did not merely resist external involvement: according to Lemma’s own admission, they accepted illegally obtained intelligence from inside the U.S. government and used it operationally.
The original 2023 criminal case alleged that Lemma transmitted maps, photographs, satellite imagery and intelligence reports through an encrypted messaging application. Tuesday’s plea removes the central uncertainty that existed at the arrest stage. The accused has now admitted the conspiracy, the recipient country is publicly named, and federal officials say the information reached military operations.
Lemma agreed to a prison term between 10 years and 21 years and 10 months if the court accepts the plea agreement. Sentencing is scheduled for April 14, 2027.
The legal outcome will punish one man. It will not answer the larger questions: which Ethiopian operations benefited, what safeguards failed across the State Department, Justice Department and National Reconnaissance Office, and whether civilians paid a price for intelligence they never knew had crossed the Atlantic.
Those questions now demand investigation, not euphemism. A contractor with access to America’s most protected systems extracted war intelligence, urged drone action and supplied a government fighting its own citizens. The plea makes that chain of events a matter of record.
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