How much can someone hate President Donald Trump? There were two assassination attempts against candidate Trump last year, one of which came within an inch of succeeding. But would you offer to betray American state secrets and defect to a foreign country to express your dislike for our 47th president?
Nathan Vilas Laatsch would — and allegedly did.
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He’s the 28-year-old employee of the Defense Intelligence Agency who was arrested last week and charged by the Justice Department with attempting to transmit national defense information to a foreign government representative.
The Laatsch case isn’t very interesting on its face, since counterintelligence hands know that, every so often, a wayward U.S. government employee tries to sell secrets to foreigners. Frequently, they are caught before actually passing any secrets, as happened to Laatsch.
What sets him apart is Laatsch’s motivation to betray secrets, and to whom. The failed traitor, who was employed in IT with DIA since 2019, where he ironically worked in that agency’s Insider Threat Division and held Top Secret security clearances, broke the law and betrayed his oath out of dislike for Donald Trump. As the DOJ explained, in March of this year, Laatch emailed a foreign government asserting that he did not “agree or align with the values of this administration” and was therefore “willing to share classified information” that he had access to, including “completed intelligence products, some unprocessed intelligence, and other assorted classified documentation.”
Then the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which got wind of Laatsch’s email, executed one of its customary ruses to catch the turncoat. After multiple communications with an FBI agent, whom Laatsch believed to be a foreign intelligence officer, he copied down classified information at his DIA office and prepared to share it with the “foreign spy.” A textbook counterintelligence game followed, using what spies term a “dead drop” at a public park in northern Virginia. At the beginning of May, Laatsch placed a thumb drive containing classified information up to Top Secret at the park location, showing what information he had access to, which the FBI retrieved.
More clandestine conversations followed, during which Laatsch explained to undercover FBI personnel that he was interested in “citizenship for your country” because he did not “expect things here to improve in the long term.” Although he said he was “not opposed to other compensation,” he was not in a position where he needed to seek “material compensation.” In other words, Laatsch didn’t necessarily want money. He wanted to defect to escape MAGA-run America.
In preparation for that, during the second half of May, Laatsch wrote down multiple pieces of classified information, then removed them from his office, in order to share them with his foreign friends. On May 29, Laatsch arrived at a dead-drop location in northern Virginia to pass more classified information to his foreign pals, only to discover that they were actually the FBI. He was then placed in federal custody.
Laatsch got caught red-handed and his guilt will be easy for the DOJ to prove in court (if this case gets that far: most national security prosecutions result in a plea bargain). However, the feds left the issue of exactly whom Laatsch was attempting to spy for intentionally murky. It was a “friendly foreign government,” without further explanation offered. Inside spy circles in our nation’s capital, speculation has been that Laatsch parleyed with a NATO ally, a close friend who wouldn’t be enthusiastic about accepting an American intelligence defector.
That’s been confirmed by new reporting in the German media, which yesterday revealed that Laatsch attempted to pass U.S. secrets to Berlin in exchange for sanctuary. Investigation by a conglomeration of news outlets concluded that, in March, the DIA cybersecurity employee contacted Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, the BND, in the hopes of eventually obtaining asylum. The BND refused to comment on this case, employing standard spy “neither confirm nor deny” language when asked about the Laatsch affair.
However, the BND didn’t play ball, instead reporting Laatsch’s email to American intelligence, which resulted in the FBI sting operation, which took the failed turncoat down by the end of May. The foolish young man misunderstood how the spy world works. Yes, German politics is broadly anti-Trump, in some cases vocally so, and the current government in Berlin hasn’t been shy about criticizing Trump.
The security relationship between Berlin and Washington?
That is another matter entirely. U.S. and German intelligence collaborate closely on a wide range of issues, and that partnership is decidedly lopsided. Germany is heavily dependent on U.S. intelligence to protect its national security, while the converse isn’t true. The CIA’s relationship with the BND is very close, while Berlin is just as dependent on American signals intelligence from the National Security Agency. Indeed, most of the terrorist plots rolled up “left of boom” inside Germany since 9/11 were halted thanks to SIGINT from NSA and its Five Eyes partners.
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There’s no universe where the BND or Berlin would endanger their tight, decidedly dependent relationship with American intelligence over a deluded young Trump-hater with access to U.S. secrets. That’s not how the spy world works.
As Nathan Laatsch has discovered, at the cost of a life in tatters and a probable prison to come.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.