A former Army Green Beret pleaded guilty Wednesday to divulging military secrets to Russia.
Peter Rafael Dzibinski Debbins, 45, of Gainesville, Virginia, pleaded guilty to a charge under the federal Espionage Act at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria.
He faces up to life in prison when he is sentenced in February.
When he was arrested in August, an indictment alleged he gave Russian intelligence agents secrets about his unit’s activities in former Soviet republics.
Debbins, a Minnesota native, had a 15-year relationship with Russian intelligence, dating back to 1996 when he was an ROTC student at the University of Minnesota, according to the charges against him.
Debbins told Russian intelligence he considered himself a “son of Russia,” and “thought that the United States was too dominant in the world and needed to be cut down to size," according to the indictment.
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