Renowned American foreign policy expert Ashley Tellis has been arrested on suspicion of spying for China. Officially, authorities have charged him with illegally retaining classified national defence information. Ashley Tellis is a senior fellow and Tata Chair for Strategic Affairs at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
Prosecutors at the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia said that the academic violated 18 USC § 793(e). The section prohibits unauthorised possession and retention of defence-related documents. Consequently, Federal authorities took Ashley Tellis into custody over the weekend.
According to US authorities, Tellis printed out classified documents and stored more than 1000 pages of highly sensitive material in filing cabinets and trash bags at home. Tellis also met Chinese government officials several times between 2022 and 2025. On one instance, he arrived with a manila envelope and left without it.
US Attorney Lindsey Halligan said that his conduct presented “a grave risk to the safety and security of our citizens.” If proven guilty, Tellis could face up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Who is Ashley Tellis?
Ashley Teliis served on the National Security Council of disgraced US President George W Bush. Bush is infamous for manufacturing lies to justify USA’s Iraq invasion. Tellis has served as a senior adviser to the American Department of State. He was also a contractor with the Department of Defence’s Office of Net Assessment.
Tellis has also written a lot about Indian national security and US-India relations. Two of his notable publications include India’s Emerging Nuclear Posture (2001) and Striking Asymmetries: Nuclear Transitions in Southern Asia (2022). He also participated in the India-US civil nuclear cooperation agreement.
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In June, he wrote an article for Foreign Affairs titled “India’s Great-Power Delusions” on “How New Delhi’s Grand Strategy Thwarts Its Grand Ambitions”. Ashley Tellis has also served as the senior adviser to the ambassador at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi.
According to his profile on Carnegie’s website, he is a “counselor at the National Bureau of Asian Research, the research director of its Strategic Asia program, and co-editor of the program’s eighteen most recent annual volumes, including this year’s Strategic Asia: Reshaping Economic Interdependence in the Indo-Pacific.”
