A Russian military bomber engineer drove up to the U.S. Southwest border in late December, asking for asylum and offering to reveal some of Russia’s most closely guarded military secrets, according to an unclassified Customs and Border Protection report obtained by Yahoo News.

The man and his family arrived in an armored SUV and asked to be admitted into the U.S. because he feared persecution for participating in anti-Putin protests in support of Alexei Navalny, an imprisoned Russian dissident. He then told CBP officials that he had information wanted by the U.S. government.

He said he was a civil engineer and that “his past employment had included working … from 2018 to 2021 in the making of a particular type of military airplane at the Tupolev aircraft production facility in the city of Kazan in west-central Russia,” according to a Jan. 11 unclassified CBP report obtained by Yahoo News.

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“He described the aircraft type as ‘an attack jet’ and said it ‘was called White Swan-TU160, the largest military aircraft.’”

The CBP report is a daily roundup of items compiled by the agency’s National Border Security Intelligence Watch and is produced to highlight emerging trends or notable events for leadership. The agency added a comment in bold italics after the paragraph detailing the engineer’s arrival and employment and explaining why his information could be valuable.

Read more: yahoo