An adviser to the Defense and State departments known as a leading expert on Indian and South Asian affairs has been charged with violating the Espionage Act by retaining more than 1,000 pages of records with classified markings at his home.
Ashley J. Tellis, who had served on the National Security Council during President George W. Bush’s administration and as a senior adviser to the U.S. ambassador in India, was arrested Saturday after the FBI raided his home in Vienna, Virginia, finding hundreds of pages with classification markings in the basement, according to court records.
Tellis was charged with unlawful retention of national defense information, for which the maximum sentence is 10 years in prison.
A naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in India, Tellis had a top-secret security clearance through his dual roles as an unpaid senior counselor to the State Department and contractor with the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment, a think tank within the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said this year that the office was being abolished.
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According to an FBI affidavit, U.S. officials had been investigating Tellis for years. He was spotted having dinner with Chinese officials in Northern Virginia on at least four occasions from 2022 to last month and was overheard discussing Iranian-Chinese relations, the U.S.-Pakistan relationship and emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, an FBI agent said in the court filing.
Tellis arrived at a dinner in 2022 with a manila envelope that he did not appear to have upon departing, the FBI filing says. At a dinner last month in Fairfax, Chinese officials gave Tellis a red gift bag, the document says.
A federal magistrate judge in Alexandria, Virginia, granted a request from federal prosecutors to hold Tellis in jail until a detention hearing scheduled for Oct. 21.
In the charging documents filed in U.S. District Court, officials said Tellis had printed hundreds of pages of classified records at Defense and State facilities in the Washington region since last month, including more than 350 pages from a document that bore markings showing that it was classified at the “secret” level and contained risk-sensitive information from a foreign government that had been obtained under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
That document’s title indicated that it dealt with “U.S. Air Force tactics techniques and procedures,” according to the FBI affidavit. A separate 40-page document marked “secret” that Tellis allegedly printed the same day, Sept. 25, concerned “military aircraft capabilities,” the court filing says.
Tellis, 64, has published several books and studies on India’s role as a nuclear power, and he was also serving as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace at the time of the arrest. He is now on administrative leave from the organization, a Carnegie spokeswoman confirmed Wednesday.
His defense attorneys, John Nassikas and Deborah Curtis, did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday. The State Department referred questions to the FBI.
Tellis was scheduled to depart for Rome with his family Saturday when the FBI executed its search warrant and arrested him, according to court records. He had booked return travel to the United States, the FBI said.