Ex-U.S. Airman Charged With Espionage

The FBI announced Monday it had arrested an American on charges of spying for the Philippine government by supplying an official there with illegally obtained secret CIA documents on Iraqi terrorist activities during the Persian Gulf War and assassination plans by a Philippine insurgent group.

The man, Joseph Garfield Brown, 44, was arrested at Dulles International Airport near here Sunday after being lured to the United States from the Philippines by undercover FBI agents with the promise of a job teaching self-defense tactics. Brown enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 1966 and served until 1968.

Brown, who was charged with three espionage counts in federal court in Alexandria, Va., Monday, has been accused of obtaining the classified documents in 1990 and 1991 in Manila from a CIA secretary, Virginia Jean Baynes, and passing them to a Philippine government official, who was not identified.

One of the documents was a U.S. intelligence report, based on information provided by a covert source, on the use of briefcase bombs by Iraqi terrorists.

The other was a U.S. intelligence report, also based on covert sources, that listed political officials targeted for assassination by a Philippine terrorist insurgent group. One of the targets was the U.S. ambassador to Manila, according to the FBI.

Baynes, 45, pleaded guilty to espionage in federal court in Alexandria without public notice May 22 and is serving a 41-month prison term, an FBI spokesman said.

Narciso M. Reyes, a spokesman for the Philippine Embassy here, declined comment on the charges and the investigation. “I’m still touching base with our home office,” he said.

The FBI began its investigation April 22, 1991, after an internal CIA inquiry determined that Baynes, who joined the agency in 1987 and was assigned two years later to the embassy in Manila, had passed two or three classified documents to Brown, according to an FBI affidavit.

In the affidavit, Richard G. Harrison, a 22-year veteran of the bureau, said that Baynes met Brown when she enrolled in a tae kwan do karate class at an embassy annex. Brown taught the self-defense class for the Philippine Department of Tourism.

Harrison said that Baynes had admitted to him that, as the friendship between her and Brown grew in the late summer of 1990, Brown asked her to obtain CIA information on assassinations planned by an insurgent group that were to be carried out in the Philippines. Baynes, who had top secret security clearance and routinely handled secret documents, complied with his request, Harrison said.

Baynes also admitted that on Feb. 5, 1991, she again complied with Brown’s requests by removing from the U.S. Embassy two secret documents and turning them over to him.

The information on the briefcase bombs was turned over 17 days after a bungled bombing attempt at a U.S. library in Manila. The bombing was linked to two Iraqi terrorists allegedly dispatched from Baghdad to conduct terrorism after the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War. Their bomb exploded prematurely, killing one of them and severely injuring the other.

It was not clear from the FBI affidavit why the Philippine government would seek information about terrorist activities that presumably would have been provided through normal channels by U.S. intelligence or law enforcement agencies.