Malta refused to arrest and extradite US Navy linguist

The Maltese government has reportedly refused a request by the US to have a Navy linguist arrested and extradited to Washington to face charges related to possession of classified defence documents, on the basis that the charges were "political".

Agents from the United States Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) made their request as they probed an alleged trip to Malta by US Navy linguist James F. Hitselberger, an experienced Navy Arabic translator, charged under the US Espionage Act, but is not suspected of espionage.

Last April Hitselberger was dismissed from his post in Bahrain and was expected to return to the United States. Instead, however, he travelled to Malta and other countries, including Britain, Sweden, Bulgaria and Germany.

MaltaToday is informed that the US government had asked Malta - and other governments - to arrest and extradite Hitselberger, but refused to do so because the charges he faces are "political".

A Note Verbale in this sense was registered in Washington DC Judge Deborah A. Robinson's file who is presiding over Hitselberger's case.

He was arrested last month in Kuwait, after the government there agreed to expel him and repatriate him to the US following an order from Washington to 'suspend' his passport.

Proceedings against Hitselberger are being described as "unique" given the circumstances he was said to be found possessing the classified documents.

Hitselberger is to be a "peripatetic collector" of rare documents.

While at the University of Texas in Austin during the 1990s, he was said to have been "working on an open-ended Ph.D. in an unknown subject".

His living quarters in Bahrain, in which a classified document was allegedly found last April, were "extremely cluttered and contained hundreds of newspapers and numerous books".

Hitselberger had donated many of his most valuable documentary discoveries over the years to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, which actually maintains a James F. Hitselberger Collection. It notably includes political posters and leaflets that he gathered in pre-revolutionary Iran.

But the NCIS have ascertained that Hoover's Hitselberger Collection also contained classified records that he had contributed.

"Agents visited the Hoover Archives and reviewed the collection. In an area open to the public, the agents found a classified document titled Bahrain Situation Update dated February 13, 2012. In a secure, non-public area of the Archives, agents also discovered two other documents marked 'SECRET'."

In bill of indictment issued against Hitselberger by the US Attorney General, the US government said that it was conceding that "the defendant... did not disseminate the classified information to a 'foreign power'."

During investigations, Hitselberger told NCIS agents that "his sole purpose was to take the materials to his quarters to read," and claimed that he did not know that the documents were classified, notwithstanding their clear markings.

Hitselberger has been remanded under US Navy custody without bond in Washington DC.