Retired Colonel Sentenced for Leaking War Plans

A long military career ended in a federal prison sentence for a retired Army colonel who shared secret war plans with a woman he'd met online. Kevin Charles Luke, 62, was sentenced in a Florida federal court to two years behind bars after pleading guilty in October to unlawfully transmitting national defense information, prosecutors said Wednesday. Luke, who spent nearly 40 years in active-duty and reserve roles before retiring as a colonel in 2018, later worked as a civilian for US Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa and held a top-secret clearance, CBS News reports.

Despite signing a nondisclosure agreement in 2019, authorities say that in October 2024 he texted a photo of a classified email from his government account to the woman, using his personal phone. "Sent to my boss earlier, gives you a peek at what I do for a living," he wrote, according to a news release from the US Attorney's Office. The office said the photo of the classified email "also revealed targets of a planned US military operation as well as the future date of the operation, the means of executing the operation, and the goal of the operation." It's not clear what operation was involved, but it was sent days before Central Command launched airstrikes in Yemen, the New York Post reports.

"The unauthorized release of the information contained within the photograph could be expected to cause serious damage to the national security of the United States," the US Attorney's Office said. The woman reported Luke to authorities after she broke up with him around two months later, the Post reports. "This was, unfortunately, a tale as old as time," defense attorney Mark O'Brien said at a hearing Tuesday. "A man trying to impress a woman. The man ended the relationship. The woman later went to the government and told on him."

Luke's sentence was below the three to four years suggested by federal guidelines. At Tuesday's hearing, Steven Hirschkowitz, a fellow retired colonel, said Luke was a man of "unquestionable loyalty" and the crime was "a singular lapse in judgment in an otherwise spotless career," the Tampa Bay Times reports. Luke, who was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury after a bomb blast in Iraq, wept as he addressed US District Judge James Moody, the Times reports. "I stand before you accepting full responsibility for my actions," he said. "What I did was wrong. I violated the trust placed in me and, sir, I am ashamed of that."