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A Department of Energy employee has been arrested and charged with trying to help the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen obtain better communications equipment.

Getting into it: According to the DOJ, Ashton Hamed Ellaboudy, a 51-year-old electrical engineer from Richland, Washington, who worked at the Energy Department’s Hanford nuclear site (which contains 57 million gallons of high-level nuclear waste), gave an FBI informant posing as a Houthi “colonel” schematics, diagrams and advice on improving the group’s communications equipment. He also bought chemicals commonly used to make homemade explosives along with parts for building drones.

According to court documents, Ellaboudy called out sick in December 2024 and blamed it on exposure to highly concentrated nitric acid, which is used to make explosives. In September 2025, he allegedly used an official passport he was issued while working for the US Army Corps of Engineers to travel to Oman and then cross into Yemen, hoping to reach the Houthi-controlled capital, Sanaa, to make “government-level connections,” though the FBI says he never made it. When he returned, he told border officers he’d been on official government business inspecting missile defense systems, but his supervisor said no such trip or program existed.

Prosecutors believe that Ellaboudy was seeking to make weapons within the US, with Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Eisenberg saying the allegations are “deeply disturbing that they almost defy imagination.”

If convicted, Ellaboudy faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.