(Newser) – "I just wanted to have somebody to love me in my old age," 63-year-old Mariam Taha Thompson told a sentencing hearing this week. Prosecutors said that was a poor excuse for passing US military secrets—including the names of informants—to a foreign national she knew had links to Hezbollah, a designated foreign terrorist organization. Thompson, a Defense Department linguist who had been stationed at a US Special Operations facility in Iraq, pleaded guilty in March to delivering classified national defense information to aid a foreign government. A man she was romantically linked with had asked for the information after the January 2020 airstrike that killed Iranian military commander Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani. She was sentenced to 23 years in prison Wednesday, the BBC reports.