The Cold War may be over but international espionage lives on. Two former employees of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico — Pedro Leonardo Mascheroni, 75, and his wife, Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni, 67 — pleaded not guilty on 20 September to 22 counts of offering nuclear secrets to Venezuela, following their arrest on 17 September.

A federal judge released Dr. Mascheroni to a halfway house while his wife was ordered to house arrest. If convicted, they face up to life in prison.

A naturalized U.S. citizen from Argentina, Mascheroni worked at LANL’s ultra-secret X Division lab from 1979 until 1987. Court records show that he was fired after criticizing some of the lab’s projects and, at the time, he was also investigated for alleged security infractions

Since March 2008, the FBI had been investigating Mascheroni as part of a sting operation. An undercover agent approached him posing as an operative for Venezuela and, according to the charges, Mascheroni wrote and provided a 132-page document entitled “A Deterrence Program for Venezuela”, containing restricted data on nuclear weapons development. Mascheroni’s wife, a technical writer who worked at the lab between 1981 and 2010, is said to have edited the document.

News of the investigation became public in October 2009, when the FBI seized many documents including computers, books, and cell phones from the couple’s home in Los Alamos.

The U.S. government alleges that Mascheroni told undercover agents he could help Venezuela develop a nuclear bomb within 10 years and that Venezuela would use a secret, underground nuclear reactor to enrich plutonium.

Image: AP Photo/Heather Clark