Gokhan Gün, a Turkish-born electrical engineer living in the Virginia suburb of Washington, the US capital, produced thousands of documents in the office where he worked for the Air Force, according to US prosecutors. According to an 11-page criminal complaint filed in federal court, many of the documents were not classified, but some were "piles of documents from a top-secret network."
Gökhan Gün is accused of illegally obtaining and keeping national defense secrets.
The prosecution is still trying to determine why Gökhan Gün, who will become an American citizen in 2021 while retaining his Turkish citizenship, accumulated so many documents. According to a law enforcement official briefed on the case, Gün secretly removed the documents from his office by wrapping them in plastic shopping bags.
Gün, who frequently travels abroad and has homes in Virginia, Texas and Florida, was taken into custody early yesterday by F.B.I. agents who came to execute a search warrant at his home in Falls Church, Va. Gokhan Gun was planning to board a 6:52 a.m. flight to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Among his suitcases, police found a document labeled 'top secret' and a black backpack containing a list of security clearances.
Investigators said that since Gökhan Gün started his job at the Air Force in mid-2023, he has printed 256 documents totaling about 3,400 pages, most of them toward the end of the workday.
Earlier this week, they added, Gün printed more than 406 pages of documents, 82 of which were labeled top secret.
Gün, who was allowed to take some of his work materials home, told agents that most of the documents in his possession were "out of classification," according to the file.Gökhan Gün was born in Istanbul and entered the US in 2001 on an H-1B nonimmigrant work visa for a telecommunications company.
He became a legal permanent resident of the US in 2012 and naturalized in July 2021, retaining his Turkish citizenship.
Gün's biography on a trade association's website lists a bachelor's degree in engineering from George Mason University, a master's degree in engineering from George Washington University, and a doctorate in computer science from Southern Methodist University.
