An American Contractor Smuggled US Secrets to Ethiopia's War Machine

Read that sentence again. "We have to finish these people once and for all." It was typed in December 2021 by a man trusted with some of America's most sensitive intelligence, a man paid to protect its secrets. He did not protect them. He sold them, one document at a time, to officials waging war on their own citizens in Tigray.

Abraham Teklu Lemma is 54, Ethiopian-born, and a US citizen. He worked as a contractor at the State Department, the Justice Department, and the National Reconnaissance Office, the agency that runs America's spy satellites. Between 2021 and his arrest in Maryland in August 2023, he walked classified material out of secure government buildings. Some of it he copied by hand into notebooks he carried out in his own pockets. Some of it he pulled electronically, using the access he had as an IT administrator. Satellite imagery and details of military activity went to Ethiopian officials through encrypted messages. The FBI says those officials used what he sent in military operations.

Think about what that means. An American with a government badge was helping a foreign army find and kill people in a war that had already killed hundreds of thousands and displaced millions. And he did it with enthusiasm. When an Ethiopian official asked him to keep the intelligence flowing, Lemma replied: "Roger that!" In one exchange he urged an official to send drones. Drones, for a war that had already become a grinder of mothers, children, and farmers.

Lemma has pleaded guilty to conspiring to transmit national defense information to a foreign government. He faces up to 22 years in prison, and his sentencing is set for 14 April 2027. The US Attorney, Jeanine Ferris Pirro, said he had abused access to some of America's most sensitive secrets. John Eisenberg, the assistant attorney general for national security, said Lemma had betrayed the United States "to an extraordinary degree." Those words are right. But the victims of this betrayal are not American. They are the Tigrayans, Afars, and Amhara civilians who lived under the bombs.

The war began in November 2020, when Ethiopian federal forces and their allies moved against the forces of the Tigray region in the north. The fighting drew in Eritrean troops, whose presence Addis Ababa long denied, and regional militias accused of their own atrocities. Investigators documented massacres, sexual violence used as a weapon, and attacks on civilians, including on hospitals and markets. A peace agreement signed in Pretoria in November 2022 stopped the main fighting, but tensions and insecurity never fully ended. Mothers are still searching for sons who were taken, and survivors are still waiting for justice that has not come.

Lemma's case exposes a pattern that should frighten every African capital. Modern wars are no longer fought only with rifles and conscripts. They are fought with drones, satellite feeds, and intelligence pipelines. Ethiopia's military relied on armed drones, including Turkish-made platforms, to strike targets across Tigray, a practice that rights groups documented repeatedly. Now we learn that some of the eyes guiding those strikes came from Langley's own contractors, smuggled out by a man who saw the war as a matter of finishing people off. Foreign powers and foreign firms are competing to sell African governments the tools of war, and too often they ask no questions about who will be killed with them.

There is an obscene irony here as well. The headquarters of the African Union sits in Addis Ababa. The continent's flagship institution for peace and security operates in the shadow of a government that was accused of mass atrocities in a war its own intelligence networks were prosecuting with foreign help. For two years, the AU talked about human rights while its host country's generals sharpened their targeting. Washington, meanwhile, lectures African governments about democracy and human rights while its own intelligence systems leaked to a war that the same American officials publicly condemned. You cannot claim to defend values abroad while your own contractors sell out those values for a foreign general's wish list.

Here is what should happen next, and none of it is complicated. In Washington, Congress must demand a full damage assessment from the NRO, the State Department, and the Justice Department. Lawmakers should ask a simple question that has not been answered: what did US agencies know about Lemma's activities before his arrest in 2023, and why did it take so long to stop him? Accountability cannot stop at one contractor in a Maryland courtroom. Those who failed to catch him must answer too.

In Addis Ababa, the government should allow a truly independent investigation into atrocities committed during the war, backed by real funding and real access to detention sites, mass graves, and military records. Parliament must exercise genuine oversight over the intelligence services, because unchecked security agencies are precisely how a foreign contractor can slip through and hand a war machine the targeting data it wants. Ethiopia's Human Rights Commission must be given independence in fact, not just in name.

The African Union must stop treating accountability as optional. Its own panels and envoys should publish findings on the Pretoria agreement, and the AU should commit to an African-led mechanism for justice that does not depend on the permission of the warring parties. Those who want peace must be willing to accept scrutiny of their own forces.

We are not without models. Botswana has built one of the continent's most respected records on rule of law, anchored by an independent judiciary and a long tradition of peaceful transfers of power. Mauritius has shown that transparent institutions and open markets can lift a nation without sacrificing civil liberties. Ghana has survived multiple elections where power changed hands at the ballot box, not on the barrel of a gun. And in 2024, Senegalese voters rejected a governing party that had overreached, proving that citizens who demand accountability can win it. Africa does not need to borrow a model of governance from anyone. We already have proof that it works.

So here is the question that should keep every African leader awake tonight. How many more of our people must die before we stop letting outsiders with classified access decide who is worth saving? How many more mothers must bury their children before our governments decide that security services answer to the people, not the other way around?

Demand that Congress publish the damage assessment. Demand that Addis Ababa open its war crimes records and let independent investigators in. Demand that the African Union choose justice over diplomatic comfort. Write to your members of parliament, support the journalists and rights defenders who document what the powerful want buried, and refuse to accept a continent where war is run by contractors and settled by drones.

Finish the investigation. Name the officials who received this intelligence. Prosecute the people who used it. Because the phrase "finish these people once and for all" should never again be typed as a plan, and it should never again be treated as just another message between colleagues.

Based on reporting by BBC