Former isle Navy officer sentenced

A Navy flight officer formerly with a top-secret P-3 Orion squadron at Kaneohe Bay has been sentenced on the East Coast to six years in prison for revealing military secrets and other crimes.

Media outlets report that Lt. Cmdr. Edward Chieh-Liang Lin was sentenced Friday in a Virginia military court. With the time he has already served, his prison term will last four more years.

Lin faced a maximum of 36 years’ confinement, the Navy said.

The 40-year-old Lin was also dismissed from the Navy. He pleaded guilty last month to mishandling classified information, communicating national defense information and failing to report foreign contacts.

Last month the Navy abandoned efforts to convict Lin of spying for China or Taiwan, striking a plea deal that instead portrayed him as arrogant and willing to reveal military secrets to impress women.

The agreement was a retreat from last year’s accusations that the Taiwanese-born Lin gave or attempted to give classified information to representatives of a foreign government.

On May 10, 2016, Adm. Phil Davidson, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces, based in Norfolk, Va., approved charges against Lin including two specifications of espionage, three specifications of attempted espionage, three specifications of making a false official statement, five specifications of improperly communicating defense information and other charges.

The espionage-related accusations leveled against Lin occurred between 2011 and 2015 in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Hawaii, culminating with his arrest at the Honolulu airport in September 2015, according to officials and the charges brought against him.

During court-martial proceedings in May, Lin admitted that he failed to disclose friendships with people in Taiwan’s military and others connected to its government. He also conceded that he shared defense information with women he said he was trying to impress.

One of them was Janice Chen, an American registered in the United States as a foreign agent of Taiwan’s government, specifically the country’s Democratic Progressive Party.

Lin said he and Chen often discussed news articles she emailed him about military affairs. He admitted that he shared classified information about the Navy’s Pacific Fleet.

He also divulged secrets to a woman named Katherine Wu, who he believed worked as a contractor for Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She actually was an undercover FBI agent.

Navy Times reported that in meetings at Starbucks, Lin told Wu about the mission and capabilities of the covert Special Projects Patrol Squadron 2 (VPU-2) “Wizards” at Kaneohe Bay, to which he was attached.

Lin also had friends with other connections, including a woman living in China whom he met online, and a massage therapist who was a Chinese national who moved to Hawaii. Lin said he gave the massage therapist a “large sum of money” at one point, although he didn’t say why. Navy Times said Lin was separated from his wife at the time.

At the time of his arrest, Lin was with VPU-2. “Special Projects” units have been known to change P-3 Orion aircraft paint schemes and identifying numbers to blend in with other Navy planes.

The squadron and several aircraft still operate from the Oahu base.

An official list of Lin’s Navy assignments said he joined the service in December 1999 as an enlisted sailor and attended Navy nuclear training at Charleston, S.C., from 2000 to 2002. He then attended Officer Candidate School and gained his commission in May 2002.

His official Navy biography says he was assigned to VPU-2 in Hawaii from Feb. 15, 2014, to March 25, 2016. He also worked for the Pacific Fleet from 2007 to 2009.