Gokhan Gun is accused of mishandling more than 150 pages of classified documents. (Carlos Bongioanni/Stars and Stripes)
A civilian engineer for the Air Force who is accused of mishandling more than 150 pages of classified documents will be held in jail as he awaits trial, a federal judge in Alexandria, Va., ruled Thursday.
U.S. District Judge Michael S. Nachmanoff said that granting pretrial release to Gokhan Gun, 50, would pose a “grave risk to national security.” Nachmanoff reversed an earlier ruling from a magistrate judge, Ivan D. Davis, who found that Gun should be released.
Gun, a dual citizen of Turkey and the United States, was arrested this month shortly before he was scheduled to fly to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. As a driver from a ride-hailing service arrived at his Falls Church residence, federal agents moved in with search warrants, finding a backpack that contained a document marked “top secret” alongside clothing, keys, a notebook and a list of Gun’s intelligence community security clearances, according to testimony from an FBI agent Thursday.
U.S. officials said the engineer specialized in wireless communications at the Joint Warfare Analysis Center in King George County, Va., which works to target adversaries’ technical infrastructure. Over several months, Gun printed 155 pages of top-secret documents at his workplace and took the records home, according to authorities. The largest batch — 82 pages marked top secret — had been printed two days before the trip to Mexico, which Gun described as a fishing excursion, according to court records. Stacks of papers with classification markings were found in his dining room, prosecutors said.
Authorities charged Gun with unauthorized removal and retention of classified information, for which the maximum sentence would be five years in prison if he is convicted. Based on new information since the arrest, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Virginia is also planning to charge him with mishandling national defense information, which is punishable by a maximum of 10 years in prison, prosecutors said. Gun’s possible motives for taking the records remain under investigation, Assistant U.S. Attorney John T. Gibbs said at the hearing Thursday.
Navy Capt. David Taft, the commander of the Joint Warfare Analysis Center, submitted a court declaration warning that, if released from jail, Gun would be able to disclose information that could cause “catastrophic loss of sensitive technologies, negatively impact sensitive military operations, and undermine years of associated research and development that has been focused on the nation’s hardest problems.”
“If Mr. Gun were to pass that information to an adversary, it would certainly help that adversary develop countermeasures to mitigate identified vulnerabilities and defeat the attack, placing military plans and personnel at risk,” Taft said.
Gun’s attorney, Rammy Barbari, said prosecutors had not provided evidence that his client shared classified information with anyone or planned to do so. He disputed that Gun was preparing to travel with the backpack containing a list of his security clearances and a document marked top secret.
“Those two documents would be more than enough to pique the interest of our foreign adversaries and would establish that the defendant had the ability to deliver more information like that in the future,” prosecutors said in a court filing.
At the hearing, Nachmanoff zeroed in on where the backpack was located, what was inside and how agents came to search it. The judge requested that an FBI agent who was part of the search team take the stand to answer those questions. Afterward, Nachmanoff said it would be concerning if Gun planned to take the backpack to Mexico — or if he left it unattended and accessible to anyone on his unlocked porch during a five-day trip.
Gun, who moved to the United States in 2001 and became a naturalized citizen in 2021, has been detained since his Aug. 9 arrest. He has no family in the United States. His girlfriend at first offered to serve as his court-mandated custodian during pretrial release, then backed out because “circumstances have proved difficult,” Barbari said in a court filing. He did not provide details and declined to comment after the hearing Thursday.
