I’m back from a week off, walking under tall trees and sitting by water. I begin this week with my latest episode of SpyCast — a conversation you won’t find anywhere else.
Inside the Navy is a unit called the Office of Special Projects. Its personnel work espionage cases, under the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS). Case agent Mike Garzon, who has worked in the office for four years, sat down with me to talk about a case that closed in 2024.
It revolved around Bryce Pedicini, who was working for the Navy in Japan as a fire controlman chief. That meant he could operate and maintain advanced weapons systems on ships.
And in 2023, Mike says Pedicini entered a classified government network, took photographs that he sent to a foreign agent, and received payment through PayPal. Pedicini said during an interrogation that he needed the money because of inflation.
He was dishonorably discharged from the Navy and now he’s spending 18 years behind bars for attempted espionage — which comes to $377 per year for the national defense information he was paid to share.
How did it all begin? “‘Hey, look, we’ve got a new case. It’s a live wire,’” Mike said he was told, keeping the backstory of the tip very vague. It was 2023, and Mike jumped on a plane to Japan where Pedicini was apparently about to share classified information. But before Mike got off the plane to interview Pedicini, he had already confessed.
Pedicini told NCIS that he had been in contact with someone who purported to be a Japanese researcher working for a nonprofit organization based in Japan.
“That was a deflating moment for me personally as an agent,” Mike divulged. “If you talk to any investigators, detectives, special agents, they’ll tell you that the interview of a subject is the height of the art… you can't force someone to confess against their will. So it really is like a test of wills to get someone to come out and say, ‘Yeah, I've been committing espionage.’”
Nevermind that the batteries for the video camera died during the interview, which Pedicini’s attorneys used in their defense. “Most offices have a built-in camera system,” Mike explained. “The local office was anticipating that this was going to go into the classified realm, [so] they brought in a separate little portable recorder, so that way you don’t burn the system basically.”
Mike was able to secure Pedicini’s laptops and cell phone, then reverse-engineer his way into seeing how this man was summoned into sharing information. We spent time dissecting Pedicini’s back and forth.
He said it began when Pedicini had listed that he was working as a ballistic missile computer technician on Facebook and LinkedIn. Mike admitted that such titles help government personnel with future job opportunities but added that it would also provide a roadmap to adversaries looking to recruit people with placement and access.
Pedicini was first contacted on Facebook, where he was asked if he would fill out a questionnaire about his time in the military. “They gave him $50 just for accepting the questionnaire, and then another $150 for actually completing the questionnaire… They said, you know, ‘What’s motivating you to work with us?’ And he wrote in there, ‘Finances, particularly because of inflation.’”
The so-called researcher began by posing easy requests. And Pedicini was “literally just copy-and-pasting entire articles that he found online into his white paper.” In certain sections, Pedicini would add in information that had been omitted for national security, Mike said. Then Pedicini started to bargain for more money.
And his handlers were often frustrated.
“They were constantly staying on top of him, trying to get him to get his homework in on time. And it was amusing to read those conversations because they would reach out to him on Monday, ‘Hey, is the paper ready?’ And he would reply back, ‘Uh, I'm almost done. I've only got the last paragraph.’ … He wasn’t the most grammatical or very studious because you could see a ton of errors, and they even called him out on it. Like, ‘Hey, look, you’ve got tons of spelling errors here. The grammar doesn’t make sense. Can you please, like, work on this?’”
Mike wouldn’t say which foreign country Pedicini was communicating with to provide U.S. secrets. Mike said his office gets tips from law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community. “So sometimes when that information comes to us, it comes with the caveat of, ‘Hey, here’s a good lead. You may want to look into this guy, but certain information needs to stay off the radar.’”
Based on what Mike told me and what I know from years of covering intelligence, everything points to China.
Pedicini’s wife, a former Navy officer, said her husband hadn’t complained about the Navy and he wasn’t disgruntled. Mike said she told investigators that he was “friendly with other women and that women would sometimes take advantage of him in terms of providing financial support.” She didn’t know why. A sailor told investigators that Pedicini had a certain fetish for women in yoga pants...
It seemed that Pedicini told a friend he was just going to mess with the foreign country. And maybe that was why his correspondence was filled with spelling and grammatical errors.
“Everyone was, for the most part, kind of surprised,” Mike said. “They describe Pedicini as a homebody, nice guy. He would look out for his junior sailors. He seemed like a pretty good chief.” He had also reportedly received awards, including an Achievement Medal and three Good Conduct Medals.
Mike said the prosecution went through the United Code for Military Justice. That’s because the Justice Department was reluctant to pursue espionage charges in previous cases, resulting in shorter prison sentences.
With Pedicini’s heavy duty sentence, the case has set the tone for future espionage cases in the Navy. “Ever since Pedicini went down and was successfully prosecuted, there has been a strong drive to push for more cases being handled within [the] military justice [system].”
Mike told me that he expects more espionage cases to be prosecuted by the Navy, especially as tensions with China rise.
Episode length: 33 minutes
Listen: On Spotify | On Apple Podcasts
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