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According to an indictment , Charles Eccleston allegedly attempted the “spear-phishing” attack in January targeting dozens of email accounts,  which he believed  would unleash a virus to collect sensitive information on nuclear weapons.

Eccleston, a former employee at the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has lived in the Philippines since 2011 after being fired in 2010.

He was caught in a sting by the Federal Bureau of Investigation after he approached a foreign embassy about providing classified US information.

Undercover FBI employees then posed as foreigners and promised to pay for the spear-fishing attack, according to the Justice Department.

The indictment did not identify the country Eccleston allegedly approached, but The Washington Post has reported that it was China.

A Justice Department spokesman declined to identify the country.

Eccleston drew on his past career to draw up email lists and compose the text of an innocuous-seeming invitation to a conference that he sent to 80 Energy Department employees, according to the indictment.

Spear-fishing involves convincing an email recipient to click on a link in a message that then releases a virus and Eccleston believed the code he included in the invitation would both damage computers and extract information. But the link had been provided by an undercover agent, who ensured it would not infect recipients’ machines, according to the indictment.

Eccleston, 62, was detained on March 27 and deported to the United States. The first hearing on the indictment is scheduled for May 20.He was charged with four felony offences, including crimes involving unauthorised access of computers and wire fraud. For the wire fraud charge, Eccleston faces a maximum sentence of 20 years.