Former State Official Gets 1 Year Over Documents

A former high-level State Department official was sentenced to a year in prison yesterday for keeping more than 3,500 classified documents at his Fairfax County home and concealing his relationship with a Taiwanese intelligence agent.

Prosecutors said Donald W. Keyser possessed far more unauthorized classified documents than any government employee ever prosecuted by the Justice Department. Keyser, 63, is one of the nation's leading experts on China and was a top adviser to Colin L. Powell, former secretary of state.

Yesterday, the government that Keyser served for three decades as a Foreign Service officer said his actions endangered national security. Keyser "allowed himself to be seduced by a female intelligence officer for a foreign government," Assistant U.S. Attorney David Laufman said as he urged a sentence of 18 to 24 months. "This case is about abuse of the public trust, reckless disregard for the government's secrets and reckless disregard for the truth."

Keyser's attorney, Robert S. Litt, recommended a sentence of probation, calling the case "the classic Greek tragedy of a great man brought down by his tragic flaws." But U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria sentenced Keyser to a year and a day in prison. "You said you were just careless," the judge told the former diplomat. "I think the government correctly points out that you did this purposefully."

The sentencing did little to resolve the lingering mystery surrounding the downfall of Keyser, which stunned the Washington diplomatic establishment. When he was first charged in September 2004, the FBI said he had passed documents to Taiwanese agents during covert meetings in the Washington area.

But court papers filed with Keyser's guilty plea in December 2005 did not mention passing any documents, and law enforcement and diplomatic sources said at the time that the case did not involve espionage but rather a government employee who became careless. Keyser pleaded guilty to unlawfully removing classified documents and two counts of making false statements. He admitted to having a "personal relationship" with the Taiwanese agent, Isabelle Cheng, and meeting her on a trip to Taiwan in 2003, a trip he concealed from his supervisors.

Prosecutors later tried to void Keyser's plea agreement, saying he wasn't fully cooperating. They withdrew the motion in December.

Keyser said yesterday that he had only been trying to create a channel of information to Taiwanese intelligence to ensure that the message of U.S. policy toward Taiwan was getting through. "What I was doing was to further U.S. interests. It was not to further Taiwan's interests," he told Ellis. "I know that some people believe that I was some kind of agent. I want to stress in the strongest possible terms that I was not."

Laufman questioned Keyser's explanations, saying it was "curious" that Keyser never mentioned his planned outreach to Taiwanese intelligence to his supervisors.

But prosecutors offered no alternative explanation. "Your honor, we may never really know why Donald Keyser committed the acts that bring him before this court," Laufman concluded.