Videos Capture US Nuclear Physicist Offering ‘Venezuelan Spy’ Nuke Info

Department of Justice(WASHINGTON) — New videos released by the Department of Justice Wednesday show a former American nuclear physicist covertly meeting with a man who he believed to be a Venezuelan intelligence officer in order to sell his expertise, as well as classified information, to the South American nation.

“This is very dangerous and I am doing it for money…I am, I told you, I’m not an American anymore,” Pedro Mascheroni says in one of the videos, which was actually recorded as part of a government sting.

Mascheroni, who once worked in the X-Division of the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the 1980s, was arrested in 2010 and accused of conspiracy to transmit restricted and classified data and attempting to “participate in the development of an atomic weapon.”

In 2013, he pleaded guilty to several of the counts involving transmitting restricted information and making false statements to federal agents. Mascheroni attempted to withdraw his guilty plea last summer, but the court denied the motion.

“[The] defendant’s aims were never noble, or part of some selfless journey that he had undertaken for the greater good of his fellow citizens,” the U.S. government wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “Rather, his actions were criminal to their core.”

The Department of Justice on Wednesday released several video clips of Mascheroni’s meetings with an undercover FBI agent posing as a Venezuelan intelligence officer. In one from 2008, Mascheroni says Venezuela could test a nuclear bomb in the Pacific.

“Everybody sees it. You don’t kill anybody. Now you tell the United States, ‘Not only do we have this, but we have [these] other designs…You have to come up and say to the other nations, ‘We are going to be, we’re going to have an umbrella for everybody. If any nation outside Latin America attacks any nation inside Latin America, we are going to retaliate with a nuclear bomb,” he says, according to court documents.

Mascherino is a naturalized American citizen from Argentina, according to court documents.

In response to the government’s stinging sentencing memorandum, Mascheroni’s defense argued that he was something of a mad scientist “entrapped” by the government.

“Anyone who has spent time with Dr. Mascheroni knows that he is completely and hopelessly obsessed with correcting the errors he perceives in the National Laboratories’ pursuit of nuclear fusion energy. This obsession has controlled his life since he lost his security clearance in 1988. Providing Dr. Mascheroni with a willing, receptive, well-funded, and non-critical audience for his scientific theories was the functional equivalent of providing crack to a cocaine addict,” the defense said in a motion last week.

Mascheroni’s wife, who also worked at LANL, pleaded guilty in 2013 to conspiracy and false statements.

Neither the Venezuelan government, nor any Venezuelan officials, were accused of any wrongdoing in the case.

Follow @ABCNewsRadio
Copyright © 2015, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.