Non-heroic behavior

Rico says he can (if he tries hard) understand someone wanting to help their country at the expense of the United States, but Venezuela? And helping them build a bomb? Crazy. But William Broad has the story in The New York Times:

A physicist and his wife, who both once worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, were arrested and charged with a criminal conspiracy to help Venezuela build an atom bomb. The arrests of P. Leonardo Mascheroni and Marjorie Roxby Mascheroni and a 22-count indictment came after a sting operation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation from 2008 to 2009. A raid on the couple’s home in Los Alamos last October hauled away cameras, computers, and hundreds of files.
“If I were a real spy,” Dr. Mascheroni told a reporter at the time, declaring his innocence, “I would have left the country a long time ago.” After their arrests, the couple appeared in federal court in Albuquerque. They were charged with handing over secret weapons information to an FBI agent posing as a Venezuelan spy. The government did not accuse the Venezuelan government, or anyone working for it, of seeking weapons secrets. Venezuela has begun exploring for uranium, but its president, Hugo Chávez, has denied interest in developing nuclear arms.
The defendants, if convicted of all the charges, face potential life sentences in prison. Dr. Mascheroni worked for Los Alamos, the nuclear laboratory, from 1979 to 1988, and his wife from 1981 until the raid on their home last year.
Dr. Mascheroni has long criticized the government’s nuclear policies as misguided, and has repeatedly accused federal agents of harassing him for his views. “Leo is a gullible nut,” said Hugh E. DeWitt, a California physicist, in a telephone interview. He knows Dr. Mascheroni and had testified before a grand jury. “He is a nut, but he has dug his own grave,” Dr. DeWitt said.
The indictment says that Dr. Mascheroni, 75, a naturalized citizen from Argentina, and Ms. Mascheroni, 67, an American citizen, handed over weapons secrets in exchange for $20,000 in cash and the promise of nearly $800,000 in all. “The conduct alleged in this indictment is serious and should serve as a warning to anyone who would consider compromising our nation’s nuclear secrets for profit,” David Kris, the assistant attorney general for national security, said in a statement.
According to the indictment, Dr. Mascheroni told an undercover agent, in March of 2008, that he could help Venezuela develop a nuclear bomb within ten years and that, under his program, the country would use a secret underground nuclear reactor to make plutonium, a type of bomb fuel. In July of that year, the FBI agent provided Dr. Mascheroni with a dozen questions, supposedly from Venezuelan military and scientific personnel. According to the charges, the physicist delivered to a post office box that November a computer disk holding a 132-page document, written in code, that contained “restricted data” related to nuclear weapons. Written by Dr. Mascheroni and edited by his wife, the document was titled A Deterrence Program for Venezuela, and officials say it laid out the physicist’s weapons plan for Venezuela. Dr. Mascheroni stated that the information he was providing was worth millions of dollars, but that his fee for producing the document was a mere $793,000, according to the indictment.
Earlier in the sting operation, the authorities say, Dr. Mascheroni asked the FBI agent about obtaining Venezuelan citizenship. In June of 2009, Dr. Mascheroni received from the box another list of questions, supposedly from Venezuelan officials, and $20,000 in cash as a first payment. On his way to pick up these materials, according to the indictment, he told his wife he was doing the transaction for the money and was no longer an American.

Rico says he wonders how, exactly, they came up with $793,000 as the right fee for treason?