The United States announced that three former American intelligence agents admitted in a federal court in Virginia on Tuesday that they participated in a computer hacking operation for the United Arab Emirates targeting enemies and opponents of the Gulf state.

The US Department of Justice said in a statement that Mark Baer, 49, Ryan Adams, 34, and Daniel Gerek, 40, agreed to pay fines totaling $1.7 million, the value of the amount they received from their work for the UAE, in exchange for the case to be dropped. 

The department added that the federal court in Virginia has agreed to defer prosecutions for three years in this complex case that highlights the global piracy market in which governments recruit foreign information security experts to spy on their enemies.

According to the ministry, the three men previously worked in US intelligence services, including the National Security Agency and in the army, before they participated from 2016 to 2019 in carrying out cyber attacks launched by an Emirati company linked to the UAE government on various targets, especially on computer servers in the United States. 

The statement pointed out that one of the hacking operations they participated in allowed them to hack "tens of millions" of smartphones.

In addition to the fines, the three men were stripped of their US security clearances and banned from engaging with the US intelligence community and from further hacking.