A US court has jailed a woman who filed a plea agreement stating she was a “foreign spy” for South Africa’s State Security Agency.
Portia Anyamba, 59, was sentenced by a court in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she was resident.
TimesLIVE is reaching out to South African government and military officials for comment. These will be published when received.
The district US attorney’s office said Anyamba pleaded guilty last month to acting as an agent of South Africa, and of making false statements in her security clearance application.
An investigation was carried out by the FBI’s Nashville field office and the US department of energy office of intelligence and counterintelligence.
This revealed: “Anyamba, a former brigadier general in the South African air force, was acting in the US under the direction and control of the Republic of South Africa and provided materially false statements in connection with her efforts to obtain a security clearance.”
Anyamba was sentenced to serve six months’ imprisonment, to be followed by two years of supervised release. As a component of her sentence, she was also ordered to pay a $9,500 (R155,568) fine.
According to plea documents filed with the court, in 2023 and 2024 Anyamba worked as a programme management operational specialist in the national security programme office at Oak Ridge national laboratory, which is a department of energy facility.
“During the course of the investigation, FBI agents learned Anyamba regularly communicated with an intelligence officer, identified in court documents as IO-1, working for the Republic of South Africa’s State Security Agency, in other words the South African government’s civilian intelligence agency.
“In February 2024, IO-1 communicated with Anyamba and arranged a meeting to occur in Knoxville, Tennessee. FBI agents surveilled the planned encounter and watched as Anyamba met with IO-1 and another individual known by the FBI to be affiliated with the Republic of South Africa.
“Though the group originally met at a restaurant in a Knoxville commercial district, they soon drove to a nearby hotel. After the meeting, Anyamba left the hotel and returned to her residence, where FBI agents watched her retrieve an item from her car and take it into her house.
“On November 7 2024, in Knoxville’s Turkey Creek shopping district, FBI personnel intercepted Anyamba prior to her planned meeting with IO-1 and retrieved a laptop computer from her custody.”
The person she met formerly held a senior role at the South African embassy in Washington, DC.
At the time, Anyamba was in the midst of her application process for a US government security clearance, which, if granted, would have provided her access to certain classified information. As part of the application process, the court heard she falsely stated she had no continuing contact with a foreigner and had not had contact with representatives of a foreign government in the past seven years.
TimesLIVE
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