Spies, Spies Everywhere

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr.

The U.S. intelligence community has thousands of them: deskbound clerks, translators and minor functionaries who spend years in decidedly unglamorous jobs in which they are privy to information more valued than their self-esteem. Last week, in separate cases, three of those faceless employees were charged with peddling American secrets to foreign agents. The harvest was apparently random; the only thread was that all were, in the words of one former intelligence official, "tawdry little people who sell their souls for a few thousand bucks." But their apprehension brought to ten the number of spy arrests this year--a number that seems to be growing--and heightened worries about the ability of an open society to keep its secrets secret.

The cases last week involved agents for three very different countries:

Jonathan Pollard, 31, a plump, balding Navy counterintelligence analyst, was accused of receiving nearly $50,000 for selling military information to Israel, a trusted ally that officially bans any spying against the U.S. His wife Anne Henderson-Pollard, 25, was later brought in on lesser charges.

Larry Wu-Tai Chin, 63, was a CIA translator and analyst for the past 33 years. According to the FBI, Chin admitted to spying for China for at least that long. Quiet and mannerly, he apparently reaped $140,000 for his surreptitious services over the years.

The one Soviet agent in the batch was Ronald Pelton, 44, a communications specialist for the National Security Agency for 14 years. He allegedly began selling secrets to Moscow shortly after his retirement in 1979. His total estimated payment: $25,000.

Officials attribute the growing number of spy arrests both to an increase in espionage and to stepped-up counterintelligence efforts by the FBI and CIA (see box). The most spectacular catch came last summer with the arrest of John Walker, a retired Navy communications specialist who sold secrets to the Soviets for 17 years with the help of his son Michael, 23, his brother Arthur and, allegedly, his friend Jerry Whitworth.

It has also been a vintage year for high-level defections around the world. The most celebrated involved Vitaly Yurchenko, the KGB agent who defected to the U.S. and, three months later, made a grandstand return to the U.S.S.R., claiming that the CIA had kidnaped and tortured him. Information he supplied led to the arrest of Pelton and implicated a former CIA underling, Edward Howard, who fled the country in September. Yet the cases do little to clear up the mystery of whether Yurchenko's defection was real; the two small fish he delivered may have been mere throwaways designed to distract the CIA and obscure the fact that he was a double agent all along.

The three latest cases have increased the sense of alarm in Washington that the U.S. intelligence community has been lax in detecting moles within its midst. Yet many saw the arrests as the fruits of an intensive crackdown. "I think it was a good week," FBI Director William Webster said in an interview with TIME. "It shows that those who want to betray have a substantial risk on their hands of being detected and prosecuted and given severe sentences." In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Reagan declared, "We will not hesitate to root out and prosecute the spies of any nation."

The Pollard case was the most controversial in last week's triple play because it involved an intimate U.S. ally. The son of a University of Notre Dame microbiologist, Pollard attended Stanford and Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where he earned a reputation as a strongly pro-Zionist Jew. Pollard used to perplex friends at college with elaborate tales about being an officer in the MOSSAD, Israel's version of the CIA.

In 1979, Pollard became a civilian analyst at the Naval Investigative Service in Suitland, Md. He first came under suspicion last month when co-workers reported that he had been taking home classified material. Two weeks ago FBI agents confronted Pollard as he was leaving his office. He was carrying about 60 highly classified papers on the military and intelligence capabilities of several foreign countries. During questioning, Pollard confessed to receiving $2,500 a month since early 1984 in exchange for U.S. documents that he gave to Israeli contacts in Washington. Agents later discovered a suitcase crammed with top-secret papers in the basement of Pollard's apartment building. Anne Henderson-Pollard had planned to destroy the material.

The frightened analyst and his wife agreed to cooperate with the FBI and were placed under 24-hour surveillance. But according to one agent, after a couple of days Pollard "just freaked out" and called an official at the Israeli embassy. "If you can shake your surveillance," Pollard later said the Israeli told him, "you should come in." That morning Pollard and his wife drove into the compound seeking political asylum. After ten minutes they were escorted back outside into the waiting arms of FBI agents.

Pollard's arrest soon turned into an ugly diplomatic snarl. Despite its promises to cooperate with American authorities in investigating the episode, Israel recalled from the U.S. two diplomats apparently involved in the case: Yosef Yagur, the science attache at the New York City consulate, and Ilan Ravid, deputy science attache in the Washington embassy. The U.S. demanded that the two officials be returned for questioning.

According to an internal investigation ordered by Prime Minister Shimon Peres, which leaked even as it was being presented to the Israeli Cabinet, Pollard worked for an unnamed high-level Israeli official who specialized in counterterrorism and ran his own spying operation in Washington. At least two Israeli newspapers named the official as Rafi Eitan, who served under former Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir as special adviser on counterterrorism from 1978 to 1984. When Peres came into power last year, he removed Eitan from his counterterrorism post but bowed to pressure and kept him on in a vaguer intelligence capacity. Last week Eitan denied the press allegations, saying "My name is in the news by mistake."

Experienced agents acknowledge that it is common for friendly nations to spy on each other. "You do what you can," said former CIA Director Richard Helms, adding "Getting caught is the sin." Most observers doubt that Pollard passed along information of great importance, since Israel is already privy to most American secrets. "Pollard should be punished for his disloyalty," said one former officer, "not for the harm he caused to U.S. interests."

On the other hand, the damage done by Larry Wu-Tai Chin may have been substantive. A Peking native, he was working for the U.S. Army liaison office in China during World War II when he was indoctrinated into Communism by a mysterious "Dr. Wang." Most of his career was spent working for the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which monitors all major foreign radio and television stations and newspapers.

Nevertheless, Chin could easily have picked up some sensitive information when he was stationed at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., during the 1970s. According to the FBI, Chin admitted last week that he regularly slipped classified documents out of the office, photographed them and turned the film over to a Chinese spy in clandestine meetings at a Toronto shopping mall. U.S. agents speculated that Chin may have provided the Chinese with CIA reports on Southeast Asia during the Viet Nam War.

The case that may have caused the most harm was the one that remained shrouded in the greatest secrecy. The National Security Agency, which Ronald Pelton joined in 1965, is the largest and most sensitive U.S. intelligence operation. Its agents are involved in electronic eavesdropping on foreign communications and deciphering secret military codes. "You always have to worry about someone at the NSA," said one U.S. official, referring to the valuable nature of any information about the agency's high-tech capabilities.

Pelton's motives for betraying his country were apparently purely pecuniary: soon after he left his $24,500-a-year job at the agency in 1979, he filed for bankruptcy, listing $64,650 in debts. According to neighbors, Pelton and his family lived in squalor in a ramshackle farm house. In 1980 he visited the Soviet embassy, and for the next five years he gave the Soviets details of U.S. intelligence-gathering methods.

Evidently the KGB considered him a good catch. On trips to Vienna in 1980 and 1983, he stayed at the residence of the Soviet Ambassador to Austria. He also underwent debriefing sessions that sometimes lasted eight hours a day with KGB Agent Anatoly Slavnov. Even though Pelton had left the NSA, he may have continued to be valuable to the Soviets as an intelligence consultant, helping them interpret data picked up from other sources.

One important aspect of the Pelton case was that it was the only one last week connected to information provided by Yurchenko and thus added another piece to the baffling puzzle the double defector left behind. Although he did not directly finger Pelton (he provided only a code name and some description of his activities), the FBI was able to combine Yurchenko's information with that from other sources to zero in on Pelton from a list of some 500 initial suspects.

Counterintelligence officials expect many more arrests, perhaps some as soon as the coming week. If Yurchenko's tips lead to the capture of Soviet spies more active than Howard and Pelton, it may turn out that the KGB man was a valuable resource. "We are still pursuing leads developed while Yurchenko was in this country," the FBI'S Webster said last week. "We are better for having had him here." --By Jacob V. Lamar Jr. Reported by Michael Duffy and Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington

With reporting by Reported by Michael Duffy, Gregory H. Wierzynski/Washington