Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Wife of espionage suspect works for the CIA

The wife of former US State Department official Donald Keyser, Margaret Lyons, is a CIA official on loan to the office of the US' top spy, John Negroponte, Negroponte's office has confirmed.
Lyons "is a CIA employee currently on a detail assignment to the office of the Director of National Intelligence," a spokeswoman told the Taipei Times on Monday.

The spokeswoman said that her office would "decline to respond" to any other questions about Lyons.

A CIA spokesman also confirmed that Lyons works for the agency. She is a "senior officer" who has worked with the agency for "decades," he said. Despite the case against her husband, the agency has not revoked Lyons' security clearance, he said.

The open-source unit that Lyons is now detailed to is the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which monitored and translated broadcasts in countries around the world, and made them available to government officials, scholars, journalists and others...

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The revelation adds a new wrinkle to the case in which Keyser has pleaded guilty to three charges stemming from his relationship with Isabelle Cheng (µ{©À·O), a former National Security Bureau intelligence officer in Washington, and whom, the FBI is trying to prove, Keyser assisted to spy on the US.

Keyser, through his lawyer, has denied that he was a spy.

One of the three charges to which Keyser pleaded guilty was having a large volume of secret and classified documents stored on his home computer and on floppy discs found in his home.

In a filing on July 5, the prosecution, without naming Lyons, said Keyser's wife knew for a year that Keyser had kept the documents at home, in violation of US law and government policy.



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