A U.S. Intelligence Contractor Pleaded Guilty to Spying for Ethiopia for Two Years, Including a Message Urging Addis Ababa to 'Please Send Drones' Against Tigray's Fighters. He Held Top-Secret Clearance at Three Federal Agencies, and Ethiopia's Government Has Not Said a Word.

Abstract: On 3 November 2026, a 53-year-old former information-technology contractor named Abraham Teklu Lemma pleaded guilty in federal court to a single count of conspiring to transmit national defense information to a foreign government, closing, for now, a case the Justice Department first charged in September 2023 without naming the country involved. That country, identified at the time by the New York Times and widely reported since, is Ethiopia. According to the Justice Department's own announcement and corroborating reporting by the Baltimore Sun, The Register, ABC News, WJLA and the Washington Times, Lemma held a top-secret security clearance across contracting roles at the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of Justice and the National Reconnaissance Office, and used that access between 2021 and his arrest in August 2023 to pass dozens of classified documents, photographs and handwritten notes, some rated Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, to senior Ethiopian political, military and intelligence officials. Much of what he shared concerned Ethiopia's internal war against Tigrayan forces, and prosecutors say that on 18 December 2021, after transmitting fresh intelligence, he wrote to his Ethiopian contact: "Please send Dro[nes]." The plea, which caps Lemma's sentencing exposure at a fraction of what the original complaint allowed, is a rare and unusually specific public record of how one state actor in the Horn of Africa reached directly into the U.S. government's own cleared workforce during an active war, and it closes with Addis Ababa having said nothing at all.

A contractor, three agencies, one clearance

The Justice Department's September 2023 criminal complaint against Lemma, a Silver Spring, Maryland resident, described him as a private contractor who had worked for more than one U.S. federal agency and specifically named his role as an IT administrator for the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the time of the alleged offenses, according to court filings reported by NBC News and Fox 5 DC. Reporting around the November 2026 guilty plea broadened that picture: the Justice Department's own release and WJLA's coverage describe Lemma as having held a top-secret clearance across contracts spanning the State Department, the Department of Justice and the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that operates the United States' spy satellites. Outlets differ on small details that the underlying record should settle at sentencing, including Lemma's age, given as 53 by The Register and as 54 by the Baltimore Sun and other outlets citing the Justice Department release. What is not in dispute across any account is the clearance itself, the span of three sensitive federal postings, and the fact that a single contractor's access became, by the government's own account, a conduit for a foreign government's intelligence collection for roughly two years before his arrest.

What prosecutors say Lemma gave Addis Ababa

According to the Justice Department's announcement of the plea, Lemma conspired with senior Ethiopian government officials across that country's political, military and intelligence branches to collect and transmit dozens of highly classified documents, photographs and handwritten notes, with some of the material classified as high as Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information, the government's most restrictive marking tier. The original 2023 complaint, as summarized by GlobalSecurity.org and CBS News, described the transmitted material as including satellite imagery and other information concerning military activity in Ethiopia and the surrounding region. Prosecutors say the bulk of what Lemma passed along concerned Ethiopia's 2020-2022 war against the Tigray People's Liberation Front, a conflict the UN and human rights organizations have separately documented as involving extensive drone strikes against Tigrayan forces and, on multiple occasions, civilians. Against that backdrop, prosecutors say Lemma's own messages went beyond passive disclosure: on 18 December 2021, immediately after sharing additional intelligence with his Ethiopian contact, he wrote "Please send Dro[nes]," a request, as several outlets including Yahoo News and Kulu Media reported it, to direct drone strikes against the paramilitary forces fighting Ethiopia's government. The Justice Department has not said whether that specific message, or the intelligence that preceded it, was tied to any identified strike.

From a capital charge to a single count

The distance between what Lemma was originally charged with and what he has now pleaded guilty to is itself part of the story. GlobalSecurity.org's summary of the 2023 complaint lists three offenses: delivering national defense information to aid a foreign government, a charge that under federal espionage statutes can carry the death penalty; conspiracy to commit that same offense; and unauthorized retention of national defense information, which carries a maximum ten-year sentence. The plea Lemma entered on 3 November 2026 resolves the case through the single conspiracy count alone, according to the Justice Department's release, the Washington Times and WJLA, with an agreed sentencing range of 120 to 262 months, or roughly 10 years to just under 22 years, subject to the court's acceptance of the plea agreement. Sentencing is scheduled for 14 April 2027. FBI Assistant Director Roman Rozhavsky, who heads the Bureau's Counterintelligence and Espionage Division, said in a statement relayed by Daily News Egypt and The Sun (Nigeria) that Lemma "betrayed our country by committing espionage on behalf of the Ethiopian government" after swearing an oath to defend the Constitution, and that the plea should serve notice that the FBI will work to identify and stop foreign intelligence services and those who assist them. The FBI's Washington Field Office conducted the underlying investigation.

Addis Ababa's silence

Neither the 2023 complaint nor the Justice Department's November 2026 announcement of the plea names any Ethiopian official by position or identity, referring throughout to unnamed senior political, military and intelligence contacts. Ethiopia's government has made no public statement responding to the plea, a silence multiple outlets covering the case, including Daily News Egypt, noted explicitly rather than treating as incidental. That silence is consistent with Addis Ababa's handling of the original 2023 charges, when the country was likewise not named in the complaint and did not comment once U.S. media, led by the New York Times, identified it as the government on the receiving end. The absence of any Ethiopian denial, clarification or acknowledgment leaves the only public account of the relationship the one contained in a U.S. plea agreement, built around a defendant's own admissions rather than any statement from the government he is accused of having served.

Why a Maryland contractor's plea is a Horn of Africa story

The case lands in a week when drone warfare and Ethiopia's unresolved internal conflicts are already the dominant story across the Horn of Africa, from Tigray's own fighters claiming hundreds of federal casualties outside Aksum to a separate UAE drone strike on Puntland's Galgala hills and an Ethiopian air strike on a displacement camp in Amhara's Hayiq Jari. Lemma's admissions describe a different and earlier channel entirely: not battlefield weaponry but classified American intelligence, allegedly reaching a wartime government through its own embedded access inside the U.S. national security bureaucracy. For an institute tracking great-power and middle-power competition over the Horn, the case is a reminder that Ethiopia's war has drawn in more than the regional drone suppliers already documented in this conflict; it has, according to a U.S. federal prosecution, reached directly into cleared American contracting staff. Whether other channels like it existed, and whether any strike followed from the intelligence Lemma admits he supplied, remain open questions the public record does not yet answer.

What to watch

First, whether Lemma's sentencing on 14 April 2027 produces any further detail, through a presentencing memorandum or a sentencing hearing, on which Ethiopian officials received the material, whether any drone strike followed the December 2021 exchange, or how investigators first identified the conspiracy. Second, whether Ethiopia's government ever responds publicly to a guilty plea that, unlike the original unnamed 2023 complaint, has been reported globally with the country identified by name and its highest intelligence classification level attached. Third, whether the case prompts any visible tightening of U.S. clearance vetting or contractor access tied to the Horn of Africa account, an area where the National Reconnaissance Office's own role in the case, if confirmed in further filings, would carry particular weight given the agency's satellite intelligence mandate.

Policy implications

For Washington, a guilty plea confirming that a foreign government obtained Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information through a contractor across three separate federal postings is a counterintelligence failure that outlasted the single clearance adjudication that should have caught it, and the case record so far does not explain how Lemma's access went undetected for roughly two years. For Ethiopia, a prosecution naming it as the beneficiary of American intelligence used, by the defendant's own admission, to request drone strikes against domestic opponents complicates Addis Ababa's relationships with Washington at a moment when it is separately seeking international backing, mediation and material support across the Eritrea standoff and the Tigray counteroffensive. For researchers and policymakers tracking the Horn of Africa's internationalized conflicts, the case is a documented instance, rare because it is backed by a federal guilty plea rather than allegation alone, of a regional government's intelligence reach extending into the cleared workforce of a major external power, a pattern worth weighing alongside the Gulf and Russian arms and drone relationships already shaping the region's wars.