FBI Arrests Prominent Washington Think-Tank Scholar Tied to Chinese Officials in Pentagon Secrets Probe

WASHINGTON – On September 15, 2022, in northern Virginia, Ashley Tellis — a foreign policy scholar long regarded as one of Washington’s foremost experts on India and U.S.–India relations — was surveilled walking into a quiet suburban restaurant with Chinese officials, carrying a manila envelope. His Chinese companions arrived moments later with a gift bag. The group took seats in a back corner, the envelope resting plainly on the table. When the meeting ended, the folder was gone — and Tellis walked out the door.

Nearly three years later, on October 11, 2025, FBI agents arrested the 64-year-old at his home in Vienna, Virginia, after recovering more than 1,000 pages of classified documents marked Top Secret and Secret during a court-authorized search. The arrest capped weeks of covert surveillance and internal security alerts that had rippled through the Pentagon and State Department, where Tellis served as an unpaid consultant with an active security clearance. The discovery and charges have shaken Washington’s think-tank and diplomatic circles, where the Indian-born academic was regarded as a geopolitical sage of uncommon influence and access — an intellectual bridge between India’s rise and American strategic power.

“Ashley Tellis is one of the most well-respected experts on India and U.S.–India ties in Washington,” The Economist’s defense editor Shashank Joshi wrote on X yesterday. “This will really shock the think-tank community.”

Canadian journalist Rupa Subramanya, also writing on X after news of the arrest broke, said, “I’ve met Tellis a few times at conferences where we’ve presented, so this comes as a shock!”

The case could also compel Western foreign-policy establishments to confront a sobering question: if one of Washington’s most trusted voices on strategic affairs could end up at the center of a national-security prosecution reaching to the heart of American military secrecy — how many like him might exist in Ottawa, London, Canberra, Paris, and Berlin?

In a criminal complaint unsealed in Alexandria, Tellis was charged with the unlawful retention of national-defense information, a felony carrying up to ten years in prison. U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan said the case represented “a grave risk to the safety and security of our citizens.” According to the Justice Department, the materials seized from Tellis’s home originated from the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment and State Department secure systems and were discovered in filing cabinets, drawers, and even trash bags.

Investigators had begun tracking Tellis weeks earlier. On September 12, 2025, surveillance cameras inside the Pentagon’s Mark Center captured him directing a colleague to print several classified documents, including one labeled Top Secret. Later that day, two file folders marked “Tellis” and the printed documents were found in his cubicle.

Thirteen days later, on September 25, prosecutors say Tellis entered the State Department’s Harry S. Truman Building and logged onto a “secret-level” computer system before leaving an hour later. That same afternoon he returned — this time carrying a leather briefcase. He accessed the system again and opened a 1,288-page document describing U.S. Air Force tactics, techniques, and procedures, a cornerstone of American air-combat doctrine. He first canceled the print command, then re-saved the document under a new title, Econ Reform. He reopened the print window, selected key pages, printed them, and deleted the file. Investigators say he also printed another document that day, classified Secret, describing U.S. Air Force Weapons School aircraft capabilities — the kind of data used in pilot training and strike planning.

On October 10, video from a secure compartmented information facility — or SCIF — at the Mark Center allegedly showed Tellis concealing printed documents, including Top Secret material, inside notepads and placing them in his briefcase before walking out. The next morning, FBI agents executed a search warrant at his Vienna residence and made the arrest.

Court filings outline other interactions that raised alarms. After the 2022 meeting, Tellis allegedly met Chinese officials again on April 11, 2023, for dinner in a Washington suburb, where they were overheard discussing Iran–China relations and emerging technologies. At another dinner, on September 2, 2025, in Fairfax, Virginia, Chinese officials reportedly presented Tellis with a red gift bag as the meal concluded.

Tellis’s dual identity — as both an insider and a public intellectual — could be seen as amplifying his impact, if the case ultimately involves the sharing of secrets with China or even subtle influence on American policy. A longtime State Department and Pentagon adviser who has held Top Secret clearance since 2001, Tellis holds the Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs and serves as a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, specializing in U.S. defense and foreign policy with a focus on Asia and the Indian subcontinent, according to his official Carnegie biography. That profile credits him with a central role in negotiating the U.S.–India civil nuclear agreement, service on the National Security Council as special assistant to President George W. Bush, and earlier postings in the U.S. Foreign Service and at the RAND Corporation.

His career — straddling academia, intelligence, and diplomacy — placed him at the intellectual core of America’s Indo-Pacific strategy, the U.S. government’s top regional priority as China threatens to invade Taiwan. NATO officials have recently warned that a Chinese military move in the Indo-Pacific could trigger a parallel crisis in Europe, with Beijing likely to encourage Russia to expand its incursions on the European continent in a coordinated effort to stretch Western defenses. Against that backdrop, the allegations against Tellis carry extraordinary military and geopolitical weight.

In another recent case, prosecutors in the same federal district underscored the national-security stakes of Chinese espionage.

In September, a U.S. Department of State employee, Michael Schena, was sentenced to four years in prison for conspiring to collect and transmit national defense information to individuals he knew to be working for the government of the People’s Republic of China.

“The price of Michael Schena’s disgraceful betrayal of his country is far more than the paltry amount for which he traded his honor,” said Erik S. Siebert, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.

“The defendant threw away his career, betrayed his country, and abused the trust the United States placed in him by granting his Top Secret security clearance,” added John A. Eisenberg, Assistant Attorney General for National Security. “He will spend years of his life in prison for passing classified information to individuals he believed to be Chinese government agents. Today’s sentence serves as a warning to those who would violate the trust placed in them by our nation and double-cross the American people.”