The Death of Ronald W. Pelton

Investigating the Life and Crimes of the NSA's Greatest Traitor

More than seven years ago, I started researching the story of Ronald William Pelton, a NSA cryptanalyst who, after leaving the agency in 1979, fell into destitution, sold government secrets to the Soviets, was arrested, and served 30 years in prison. Although he fell into obscurity, many consider him the worst traitor in NSA history, and he remains a key figure in the Year of the Spy, the period around 1985 when a number of US government employees were unmasked as foreign agents.

Pelton died on September 6, 2022, according to an obituary apparently published by his family. I don’t think his death has been reported in the media. When I researched Pelton for a possible book project, I put together a chapter about his betrayal, the investigation, and his trial. I decided to publish it today, on the occasion of Pelton’s death. Based on government documents, trial notes, newspaper reports from the time, memoirs of KGB officers, and my own interviews with intelligence and law enforcement veterans, it is, I believe, the most complete non-classified account of what Pelton did. (There’s likely a lengthy, classified post-mortem report on Pelton somewhere in the NSA archives. Books on Ivy Bells and other cases from the 1980s have also added important context.)

There’s some previously unreported information in here, including the story of a government agent who allegedly impersonated a lawyer to take some of Pelton’s jailhouse writings. There are reflections from Pelton’s NSA supervisor and from the lead FBI agent and prosecutor on his case.

If anyone has any corrections, or would like to talk about Pelton and this period of history, please get in touch.

UPDATE, 9/13/22: A member of Ronald Pelton’s family shared this page of remembrances in the comments.

Ronald Pelton Volunteers
By Jacob Silverman

A Walk-In
He had made many poor decisions on his way to betraying his country, but this wasn't one of them. He told the voice on the other line that he would be there the next night, when it was dark. Instead, the following afternoon, he called again and said that he would arrive in a few minutes. The FBI, which tried to maintain constant surveillance of the Soviet Union's embassy in Washington, D.C., wasn't ready. The agents watching the embassy on 16th St saw a sandy-haired man walk in, but they never saw him leave. The FBI had been tapping the Soviet embassy's phones and had picked up phone calls of a man promising an embassy staffer "very interesting information." But the bureau didn't know who the man was or that he had just walked through the enemy's front door. Arriving unexpectedly like that was one of the few bits of decent tradecraft practiced by Ronald Pelton, who had once worked at the heart of the United States' global surveillance apparatus, monitoring its rival superpower, before his life fell apart. As for the FBI, its failure to figure out just who had walked in the embassy door on January 15, 1980, would haunt it for the next five years.

Born in Benton Harbor, Michigan, in 1941, Ronald William Pelton enlisted in the Air Force after high school. The Cold War was running at full throttle, so Pelton learned Russian and was assigned to work as an intelligence analyst at bases in Texas and Pakistan. Discharged in 1964, he married a woman named Judith, had the first of four children, and for a short time, lived humbly in his hometown of Benton Harbor, where he repaired TVs. By November 1965, Pelton would be back to putting his Russian and analytical skills to use, this time as a civilian employee of the NSA. For fourteen years at the intensely secretive agency, beginning as a communications specialist, Pelton worked on signals intelligence, targeting the communications of the Soviet Union. He was considered a smart employee, a sort of trouble-shooter who had authored a key manual used by his department. But he also became known for his arrogance, with a tendency toward immature antics. During a posting in the United Kingdom, where Pelton was assigned from 1966 to 1972, he broke into a slot machine and stole $13.50, earning him a reprimand from an agency officer. While in England, he had an affair with the wife of a fellow NSA employee; the NSA, believing that Pelton was more important for the mission, responded by sending the other employee, and his wife, back to the US. Pelton was also an inveterate schemer, frequently thinking up new business ideas, some of which he would try out on his coworkers. Later in his NSA career, he spent weekends going to boat shows and working as a yacht salesman. He told some of his friends at the agency that he would eventually make enough money that he could leave clandestine work behind.

It wasn't that Pelton wasn't well-compensated at the NSA — his salary, by the end of his career, was $24,500 per year, a solidly middle-class income for the time. But Pelton also had four children and he had appetites of his own — for profit, for pleasure, for risky behavior — that made it hard to keep money in the bank and damaged his relationship with Judith. In April 1979, Pelton was forced to file for bankruptcy. The final blow, he claimed, was when thousands of dollars in building materials were stolen from a lot he owned, where he had planned to build a house for his family.

By this point, Pelton appeared to be filled with equal parts desperation and delusion. He told his friends at the NSA that he would soon be making more money selling boats or indulging in one of his other get-rich plans. But at the same time, he was seen as somewhat of a buffoon. A gadget he peddled to his coworkers — a gas-saving device that connected to a car's carburetor — didn't work, though he had sold them to many people he knew (this was the late seventies, in the aftermath of the gas crisis). Pelton's own supervisor, Philip Ambler, felt snookered and confronted Pelton, who by then had left the agency, at a barbecue for their department. It was one of the last times he saw Pelton, who sheepishly wrote Ambler a check — which cashed, Ambler noted with some surprise. After handing over the check, Pelton "took off," and Ambler later wondered if Pelton had come to the picnic to pry a few new secrets out of his former colleagues.

Ambler, who spent 35 years as a cryptanalyst at the NSA, thought he knew Pelton better than anyone. But at the place once nicknamed No Such Agency, that didn't mean much. Ambler, Pelton, and other coworkers sometimes had lunch together, but they saw each other only a couple times outside of work, and Ambler said that no one else at work seemed to have anything resembling a close relationship with him. Ambler knew that Pelton had a wife and kids, but he had never met them. Pelton was considered smart, with a good memory, but he also had "an ego which you can't believe," Ambler said. "Above all else: ego."

Despite his outsized opinion of himself, Pelton knew that his bankruptcy meant that his career at the NSA was probably cooked. He could never pass a polygraph test, during which he would be asked about his finances. But perhaps he also genuinely thought he could make more money if he became a full-time yacht salesman. Ambler said that Pelton had been running this very possibility by him in the months before he quit — without, of course, including the important proviso that he was facing financial ruin. Despite his bravado, the polygraph still loomed, so Pelton made one of the few choices available to himself and resigned from the NSA in July 1979. Less than six months later, his situation deteriorating, he would offer up for sale the last asset he had. On January 14, 1980, he called the Soviet embassy in Washington, D.C. and without identifying himself, dangled his knowledge of top secret information. He called again the next day and walked in the door soon after.

When Pelton first walked into the Soviet embassy, he was met by the duty officer at the time, Vitaly Yurchenko, who served as the rezidentura's chief of security. Introducing himself as Vladimir Sorokin (perhaps coincidentally, the name of a noted Russian novelist), Yurchenko divined Pelton's purpose and then ducked upstairs to talk to his boss, KGB colonel Victor Cherkashin.

Yurchenko walked into Cherkashin's upstairs office and handed his boss a sheaf of papers that Pelton had brought to prove his NSA bona fides. The papers seemed technical in nature and were "nothing extraordinary," in Cherkashin's view. But they told him that Pelton was the real deal: a former NSA employee who was eager to trade secrets for cash. That Pelton asked for money immediately only confirmed Cherkashin's suspicion that the offer was genuine. "Most walk-ins," Cherkashin later reflected, "claim they want to spy for ideological reasons to prove their sincerity." In fact, ideology was rarely the principal motivating factor for a spy. Pelton's upfront demand for money revealed his desperation and his true intentions.

Cherkashin sent Yurchenko back downstairs with some basic queries to ask their would-be spy. Who knew about Pelton's plans? Family? Friends? How'd he get to the embassy? Did anyone see him arriving?

Yurchenko soon returned and told Cherkashin that Pelton had made his decision alone but that the FBI may have seen him walk into the embassy. Cherkashin told Yurchenko to finish the initial debriefing while he decided how to get Pelton out without attracting the attention of the FBI's surveillance teams. The KGB knew that the FBI was surveilling the embassy, and they were reluctant to simply send Pelton back through the front door. They would have to disguise him and smuggle him out of the embassy somehow.

Cherkashin soon hit on a perfect idea. For decades, the construction and maintenance of the two superpowers' embassies in Washington, D.C. and Moscow had been mired in bickering, mistrust, and suspicions that each side was taking every effort to blanket the other's embassy with surveillance devices. (Often, they were right to be paranoid.) These suspicions extended to local workmen and everyday staff and were so severe that for 15 years, the United States refused to move into its new embassy in Moscow, believing that the building was hopelessly compromised. Because of this history, the Soviets decided, when it came time to do some light renovations in their DC embassy, they couldn't hire American workers. There was simply too much likelihood that the FBI would manage to insert one of its people in a crew of carpenters or plumbers. To get around this problem, the Soviets took the expensive step of flying in construction workers from Russia, putting them up at a house that the Soviet government owned in the D.C. suburbs, and busing them to and fro each day. On January 15, 1980, the work crew leaving through the back of the embassy had a new member: a freshly shaven man, who might have looked a little bit awkward in his painter's scrubs, had the FBI bothered to notice. Instead, Pelton was driven with other workers to a Soviet-owned house. They then changed his clothing again, put him in an embassy car, drove him around for a while, and dumped him in front of a busy shopping mall. And like that, Ronald Pelton had become a spy for the KGB.

Pelton was dropped off in front of the mall by a man named Gennadiy Vasilenko, who would soon become the spy's main KGB handler. The two sometimes met discreetly around Washington in pizza parlors or busy shopping areas. A smooth operator and a former top athlete (he had competed for a KGB-affiliated volleyball team), Vasilenko liked to joke that he was the first person to get into the KGB on an athletic scholarship. His meetings with Pelton were characterized by intense secrecy and careful coordination. To throw off surveillance, ten cars would leave the Soviet embassy compound at once. One of them would be driven by Vasilenko, who would then motor around for hours, with no apparent destination, until he finally headed toward Fairfax County, Virginia. There he'd drive to Tysons Corner Center, a massive shopping mall, and pick up Pelton in the parking lot.

During his time working for the KGB, Pelton was twice flown to Vienna for extended debriefings. He was met there by a man named Anatoly Slavnov, who had previously been posted in D.C. For eight hours a day over several days in October 1980 and January 1983, Slavnov peppered Pelton with questions about his work at the NSA and submitted written questionnaires to him. For these meetings, Pelton received a reported $20,000 and $15,000 respectively.

A neutral country in the Cold War years, Austria was a common meeting place for Soviet spies and their western moles. John Walker, the leader of a naval spy ring who was arrested months before Pelton, received training from the KGB in Vienna. So did Andrew Daulton Lee, a former intelligence contractor who sold information on spy satellites to Soviet agents. Metropolitan Iriney, the Russian Orthodox Church's bishop in the Austrian capital, helped recruit spies for the KGB, including George Trofimoff, a colonel in US Army intelligence. (As a child, when Trofimoff's White Russian family fell on hard times, the parents of the future bishop took Trofimoff in, and the two young men considered themselves to be like brothers.) The Orthodox Church was also something of a puppet of the Soviet secret services. "Most of the Orthodox hierarchy was in some way connected to the KGB at the time," according to former KGB counterintelligence officer Victor Cherkashin.

Not all of Pelton's jaunts to Vienna went so smoothly: on one trip in April 1985, he waited in a park for more than a day for his KGB contact, who never showed. Pelton had gotten the details of the meeting wrong.

This kind of behavior wasn't atypical for Pelton during the early 1980s, when he was sliding ever deeper into a personal and financial hole. He was separated from his wife, alienating himself from his four children. Despite his entrepreneurial brio, he never found his footing as a businessman, embarking on a number of quixotic schemes and odd jobs after he left intelligence work: landscaping, computer consulting, facilitating international business deals, developing his gas-saving mechanism, selling yachts. All of them were failures. At a bar one night in April 1984, Pelton met a young woman named Ann Barry. They became a couple and he sometimes paid the rent on an apartment where she lived, though he also spent nights elsewhere, including on a boat. Through Barry, Pelton developed his taste for partying, and the two liked to drink screwdrivers and to shoot up Dilaudid, an opiate painkiller similar to morphine. The relatively modest payments he received from the KGB had never done much to allay his debts, which, when he filed for bankruptcy in April 1979, totaled more than $65,000. Part of the problem was that Pelton, having lost his access as an NSA employee, didn't have much to sell, besides, of course, what he knew. (For that reason, prosecutors would later emphasize Pelton's supposedly photographic memory — an ability that would also be cited against Jonathan Pollard in his trial.)

As the botched Vienna meeting showed, Pelton, for all his ego, sometimes muffed the basics of spycraft. On the last Saturday of each month, Pelton received a call from his handler at a payphone at Pizza Castle Restaurant in Falls Church, VA. When he was supposed to go to Vienna, the Soviets would leave $2,000 at a different payphone. The day of one of these calls, Pelton was too drunk to drive and sat in the passenger seat as Barry drove. The car ran out of gas before they reached their destination and, Barry would later testify, Pelton became incensed.

Pelton had already quit the NSA by the time he agreed to commit espionage for the Soviet Union, meaning that his main asset was the secrets in his head. That was no small matter, as the NSA was engaged in many top secret SIGINT surveillance operations against its main adversary, and Pelton had direct knowledge of these operations, had participated in some of them himself. Disclosing the very existence of these operations would cost the US government millions, or even billions, of dollars and, in the case of one extremely dangerous operation conducted at the bottom of the ocean off of Russia's eastern seaboard, could lead to a shooting war.

That last operation was known as Ivy Bells and had been in the works since the early 1970s. A joint operation between the NSA, Navy, and CIA, it was as daring as any surveillance operation ever performed on behalf of US intelligence, and Pelton knew all about it. On the bottom of the Sea of Okhotsk, off of the eastern seaboard of the Soviet Union, a US submarine placed a tap on a Soviet communications line. Because this was the early years of the digital age, the tap involved a physical tape that had to be collected and replaced each month. (Today, the United States and other nations have developed even more surreptitious ways to tap into and monitor undersea internet cables.) The missions to service the tap were conducted with the highest secrecy — many of the sailors involved were told that they were on a mission to salvage a sunken Soviet ship — and required navigating past sensors placed by the Soviet navy, which had an important base on the nearby Kamchatka Peninsula. Less than 100 people across the US government knew the full details of the operation. But the payoff was enormous, allowing US forces to monitor a huge swath of Soviet naval communications in the Pacific and to learn secrets about their ships' capabilities.

By 1981, the Ivy Bells program appeared compromised, though no one knew why. What was clear was a satellite photo showing Soviet ships lingering suspiciously in the area of the sea where the tap had been placed. A follow-up mission confirmed what had already been suspected: the tap was gone. (In 1999, the tap mechanism would re-appear in a Russian museum exhibit.) It would take several more years before the US government learned that one of its former intelligence employees had exposed Operation Ivy Bells for the equivalent of less than a year's salary.

Despite Pelton's occasional bouts of incompetence as a spy, the US government had little idea who he was or even that a former NSA employee was out there running off his mouth to whoever would open up his bankroll. But it wasn't just Pelton about whom the intelligence establishment was in the dark. Throughout the 1980s, the United States found itself losing assets and surveillance taps, being fed disinformation and dangled with fake double agents. KGB and GRU agents who had reliably fed their American handlers secrets for years were suddenly recalled to Moscow, questioned, and executed for treason — shot in the basement of the KGB's Lubyanka headquarters. The losses were extensive and were only partially explained years later with the arrests of CIA officer Aldrich Ames and FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who, as spies for Moscow, turned out to be two of the most damaging traitors in American history. In memoirs and interviews, some retired intelligence officials still wonder if the decade's punishing mole-hunt missed some highly placed official whose cover as a Russian spy remains in tact to this day. Apparently some former Soviet intelligence officers agree. In 2005, Victor Cherkashin wrote that "the United States still hasn't found at least one other Soviet agent in the CIA or FBI responsible for some of the losses in 1985. In other words, another Ames or Hanssen remains at large."

An Unusual Lead
The key tip in the Pelton case — the tip that ensured there was a case at all — came from one of the more bizarre defectors in the annals of intelligence. A colonel in the KGB, Vitaly Yurchenko was an ostensibly successful member of one of the country's elite institutions, but he wasn't happy. In August 1985, he was in Rome, working on a mission with agents from the local rezidentura, when he slipped away to the American embassy and announced his intention to defect. Yurchenko was a major prize — the highest ranking defector in KGB history — and was soon spirited to the United States, where he was installed in a Virginia safe-house that, it was hoped, would be beyond the prying eyes of Soviet agents posted in the capital region. (Under President Reagan, the US government, hoping to stymie their adversaries' ability to conduct espionage, limited Soviet officials to a 25-mile radius within and around Washington, DC.)

Yurchenko fell under the joint management of the FBI and CIA, but any possible agency rivalry or bureaucratic infighting was eclipsed by Yurchenko himself, who proved a mercurial character. Although he rose to be a colonel, he had a checkered KGB career. Oleg Kalugin, former head of KGB counterintelligence, called Yurchenko "unqualified and unsuitable," a "sloppy, unreliable officer" with "empty, evasive, pale blue eyes" and a poor command of Russian. In the mid-seventies, one of Kalugin's superiors asked him to send Yurchenko to Washington D.C. Yurchenko had somehow curried favor with the senior officer, and the officer was now leaning on Kalugin to give his friend Yurchenko a highly desired assignment. Kalugin reluctantly complied but he later considered Yurchenko to be "an unmitigated disaster."

Yurchenko spent about eight years in the US capital, and his time there was mostly distinguished by his shoddy professionalism. He slept around, including with the wife of a Soviet diplomat and with an American woman who may have been an FBI informant. In 1976, while Yurchenko was serving as head of security at the DC rezidentura, a former CIA officer named Edwin G. Moore threw a package over the wall of the Soviet embassy. Yurchenko and Dmitri Yakushin, the KGB rezident who Moore had already made several attempts to contact at his home, sent a cable to KGB Center in Moscow discussing the situation. Yuri Andropov, the KGB chairman, cabled back that the incident was likely an FBI provocation and that they shouldn't respond to the volunteer. Worried that the package might contain a bomb, Yurchenko handed it over to the DC police. It turned out that Moore was a genuine traitor hoping to cash in on the 22 years he had spent in the agency's research division. He was promptly arrested, and when the FBI searched his home, they found hundreds of pages of CIA-related documents and photographs, including a typewritten note that offered access to CIA secrets for $10 million. (The package that Moore tossed over the embassy wall had included a request for $200,000.) Moore, who had a heart attack while in custody, was found guilty, sentenced to 15 years in prison, and paroled three years later. Yurchenko — and Yakushin — had whiffed on collecting a potential windfall of US secrets. For Yurchenko's KGB colleagues, Victor Cherkashin wrote, "the incident became notorious as a glaring example of unprofessionalism." Kalugin called it "an indescribably stupid error." It didn't much affect Yurchenko's career, as his connections helped him rise to senior intelligence posts, where he gained access to highly secret information about Soviet agents in North America and other clandestine operations abroad.

When Yurchenko decided to defect in 1985, it was for reasons beyond dissatisfaction with the sclerotic Soviet system. He was also an inveterate hypochondriac who was convinced that he was dying of stomach cancer. More than that, Yurchenko was lovesick. He pined not for his wife and family but for his former lover, Valentina Yereskovskaya, the wife of a Soviet intelligence officer who at the time was posted to Montreal. Yurchenko was determined to reunite with Yereskovskaya before he died. And though the erstwhile KGB-man had begun to talk, he was also jittery and unsettled. Some of the US officials working with him worried that he might reconsider his defection, so in September 1985, an unorthodox decision was made: Yurchenko and a handful of minders would make a clandestine trip to Canada, where he would confront his former lover and ask her to join him in the United States.

The trip was risky and unnecessary. What if it was some kind of setup? What if Yurchenko bolted? What if one of Yurchenko's former KGB colleagues spotted him? These were well-founded fears, but the disaster arrived in another form entirely. When his romantic rival was out, Yurchenko, aided by his American handlers, knocked on his lover's door. Yurchenko explained his purpose for being there, but Yereskovskaya quickly rejected him. He was a traitor and why would she, a loyal Soviet citizen, betray her husband and her people to run off with him into the arms of the main enemy?

Yurchenko was devastated. His emotional state worsened when he learned that news of his defection had been reported in the American and Canadian press. It seemed that William Casey's office, perhaps with the blessing of others in the Reagan administration, had made the decision to brag to the media about their important new catch. Growing depressed and suspicious, Yurchenko and his minders soon flew to back to the US. Yurchenko slunk back to the safe-house in Oakton, Virginia, where his debriefings continued.

Yurchenko had already revealed some important information, including that a former NSA employee had walked into the D.C. embassy and offered information. He remembered meeting the man and that he had red hair, but he couldn't remember his name. He might be named Mr. Long, Yurchenko said, but he wasn't sure. In mid-October, when Yurchenko's mood seemed to be darkening in the wake of his failed romantic reunion, his handlers took him on a trip of the American southwest, including to the Grand Canyon. An FBI agent flew out to meet Yurchenko and his entourage, presenting the former Soviet colonel with a "mug book" of present and former NSA employees. This time, Yurchenko spotted the face of the man he remembered from five years earlier: it was Ronald Pelton. But as the CIA's Milt Bearden would eventually remark, it seemed that identifying Pelton did little to lift Yurchenko's mood. In fact, he may have been sent deeper into depression by the realization that he might have to testify against Pelton and others in court. He also soon received another bit of disheartening news: he didn't have stomach cancer. Not only was he not going to die, Yurchenko would have to live with what he had done for a long time.

While it took some work to put a name to the face of the former NSA analyst, Yurchenko was able to help investigators to identify another Soviet asset: Edward Lee Howard, a washed-out former CIA agent. Howard was already under investigation, and Yurchenko's tip turned up the heat. Howard, who had been trained in how to lose surveillance while operating in hostile environments, was then eking out a life in New Mexico. He had been questioned by the FBI and knew that he might be arrested at any time. One night, aided by his wife and a dummy he had fashioned to resemble himself and placed in the passenger seat of their car, Howard slipped away from an FBI surveillance team and fled the country. Eventually — after a long, clandestine journey that saw him transit from Albuquerque to Tucson to St. Louis to New York — he arrived in Helsinki, where the KGB was waiting for him. They helped get him to Russia, and he claimed asylum. (Howard's escape was theatrical and effective but also not quite necessary: the FBI surveillance team tasked with monitoring him didn't see when Howard left his house with his wife, much less that he later ditched the car and left a dummy in his place.)

Later some would speculate that Howard was somehow tipped off by CIA officer Aldrich Ames, who was then an active Soviet agent, giving detailed reports to his KGB handlers on the debriefing of Yurchenko. Apparently concerned that his own treachery might be exposed, Ames made it a point of staying close to Yurchenko during his defection. One could imagine the terror in Ames' heart that Yurchenko might have recognized him as a Soviet agent; one word and everything would crumble. Taking a calculated risk, Ames gave Yurchenko just such an opportunity. Riding in a car together soon after Yurchenko's defection, Ames passed a note to the Soviet defector, asking if there was any sensitive information he wanted to reveal only to the CIA Director. Ames was giving Yurchenko an option to reveal, say, a mole at the heart of the CIA. But Yurchenko said he had no such message to pass along. Ames' secret was safe.

Instead, the Yurchenko case collapsed on the altar of heartbreak. On November 2, 1985, two months after his disappointing trip to Canada, Yurchenko went to dinner in a Georgetown restaurant with a CIA handler. At one point, Yurchenko asked the agent what would happen if he tried to leave. "Will you shoot me?" The CIA officer said that that's not how his government treated defectors. Yurchenko rose from the table to go to the bathroom. "If I don't come back, it's not your fault," he said, puzzling the agent. And like that, the prized defector walked out and disappeared. He would soon show up at the Soviet embassy, claiming that he had been drugged and kidnapped. (Potential defectors had been abused and drugged in American custody before, so his claims weren't too far-fetched.) The United States had a policy of allowing defectors who changed their minds to return home, so during an uneasy meeting involving Yurchenko and a handful of Soviet and American officials, the former asylum-seeker affirmed his desire to return home. Returning to the Soviet Union, Yurchenko was awarded a medal, while the Soviet government touted the success of its operation. Yurchenko, fifty years old at the time, served out the remainder of his KGB career and retired in Russia, where he remains today.

Was Vitaly Yurchenko a double agent all along? Was he, like so many Soviet agents before him, dangled in front of the Americans as part of a larger disinformation campaign? Maybe this one went farther than most — with a defection and re-defection — because the Soviets were looking to steer attention away from some highly prized assets. Nine years after Yurchenko's return to Russia, Mikhail P. Lyubimov, a retired KGB colonel, wrote of his belief that the entire operation was orchestrated by the KGB from the beginning, including Yurchenko's initial defection in Rome. The aim, according to Lyubimov, had been to maintain Ames' cover by feeding Howard to the Americans. (Howard's own evasion skills, combined with the FBI's decision not to send one of its top surveillance teams to New Mexico, may have allowed the disgruntled former CIA agent to abscond before he could be arrested.) That might also explain why Yurchenko dangled information about Pelton, who had by then been mostly exhausted as a source of information. If so, then the KGB conducted what Lyubimov called a "brilliant operation." Thus, "a huge red herring was let loose into US waters," Lyubimov theorized. "The KGB could start chasing the agents betrayed by Ames while the Americans were supposedly tricked into believing that it was Howard who was responsible for the leak."

Lyubimov's theory is an enticing one, and it's been echoed by other intelligence professionals over the years. Still, it's more likely that the first explanation is the correct one — that Yurchenko was spurned by his lover and, falling into drink, guilt, and self-recrimination, recognizing that he would spend the rest of his days adrift in an unfamiliar country, began to regret his defection. The Soviet leadership might also have seen the wisdom in accepting Yurchenko back and treating him as a genuine double agent. After all, acknowledging any flaws in the Soviet system was considered anathema, so there was never any reason that someone would want to defect — ergo, Yurchenko could never have had a change of heart; he was a loyal KGB infiltrator the whole time. Whether this story was true or not, it followed the accepted Soviet logic, and it allowed Yurchenko and the KGB to save face.

Victor Cherkashin, who was serving as KGB chief of counterintelligence at the DC station at the time of Yurchenko's defections, offers an insider's view of what happened, and his story comports with the notion that Yurchenko simply changed his mind. In Cherkashin's telling, Yurchenko's initial defection to the United States was legitimate and took the KGB by surprise. But when he decided to try to re-defect, the KGB leadership determined to make the most of the opportunity. They could have brought Yurchenko home and promptly executed him for treason, but the Soviets were already dealing with a number of recent defections; they didn't need to add another traitor to the list. What's more is that Aldrich Ames was keeping his KGB handlers informed about everything Yurchenko was doing, so the KGB had a keen sense of who had and hadn't been compromised. (Because Cherkashin had strictly limited the number of people who knew about Ames, to the point of traveling to Moscow to update his superiors in person, his prized agent's identity was unknown to Yurchenko.) KGB Chairman Vladimir Kryuchkov could see the advantage in playing up Yurchenko's story of being kidnapped and drugged and his subsequent escape — after all, such tales had played out before, on both sides. "Yurchenko's defection may not have been an elaborate operation to protect the KGB's top agent" — that is, Aldrich Ames — "but his redefection became exactly that," Cherkashin later wrote. "His arrest would have given the game away." And even if the story retained an air of unreality, the sense of confusion it engendered was to the KGB's benefit: "The [CIA] had either been completely taken in by a brilliant Soviet intelligence officer, or allowed one of its top Soviet defectors to slip out of its hands." Either way, the Americans were embarrassed, left wondering what might have been.

The Soviets had another reason to bring Yurchenko back into the fold: it allowed them to get rid of yet another traitor. Ames, Hanssen, and other Soviet assets were revealing to their handlers the names of Soviet agents spying for the Americans; something had to be done about these moles as well. One such man was Valery Martynov, an officer in the KGB's Line X division, who had begun spying for the Americans in 1982. At the time of Yurchenko's defection, Martynov was assigned to the Washington DC rezidentura.

Cherkashin was deeply upset when he learned that Martynov, who he liked and considered a decent man, had betrayed his people. Another problem presented itself when Cherkashin realized that he would have to find an excuse to have Martynov recalled back to Moscow without tipping him off, as the trip would likely end in Martynov's execution. But Cherkashin gamely took on the task and landed on a clever way to get Martynov back to KGB headquarters. He told Martynov that he would be a member of the KGB honor guard escorting Yurchenko back home to a hero's welcome. On November 6, Martynov boarded the plane to Moscow with Yurchenko — a fact that later confused FBI officials, who wondered why the agent they had given the cryptonym GENTILE was part of this mission and why he never came back. It would take the Americans a year to find out what had happened to him.

As soon as he disembarked in Moscow, Martynov was arrested. After eventually pleading guilty, he was executed in May 1987. For Cherkashin, who testified at Martynov's trial, "it was one of the events in my career I most questioned." Cherkashin was loyal to his country and to the KGB, but he didn't always approve of its methods and he clashed in particular with Kryuchkov. "I was only doing my job, but the moral dilemma weighed heavily," he reflected. "As far as I was concerned, officers who turned traitor should be fired and deprived of their pensions. That's enough. There's no need for execution."

The Investigation Begins
While the Yurchenko saga rattled the US intelligence community, it also put them on Ronald Pelton's trail. The FBI formed an investigation, gave it the name Operation Passerine, and put a veteran agent named Raymond J. Batvinis in charge. Batvinis had joined the FBI in 1972, when he was part of the Bureau's first class of trainees that included women. A tall midwesterner with a gravelly baritone and a relaxed affect, Batvinis is a keen student of FBI history, describing scenes from the early life of J. Edgar Hoover that played out on the streets around us. After Batvinis retired from the FBI, he earned a PhD and became a historian, specializing in counterintelligence and the agency he once served. But before that, he spent six years on the counterintelligence beat in Washington, D.C., with some time spent at FBI headquarters where he trained other FBI agents and intelligence professionals. In 1981, he was posted to Baltimore, and in August 1985, he was promoted to supervisory special agent in Baltimore, working on counterintelligence, counterterrorism, and other national security issues.

Within weeks of Batvinis' appointment to supervisory special agent, officials from the Navy and NSA came in to see his boss, the special agent in charge, Dana Caro. They told him about the top-secret Ivy Bells project, which had been compromised. "The great fear was that this guy was still in NSA," Batvinis said. It was up to the FBI to figure out who this person was and ultimately to stop him.

"You're forming the task force," Caro told Batvinis. "Separate room. Balls to the wall."

Batvinis was given carte blanche to pick anyone from his Baltimore field office for his task force. It felt like he was the general manager of a sports team, charged with drafting his dream roster. "For me it was a wonderful experience," Batvinis recalled. "Everybody realized what the stakes were in this. My problem was holding them back. You have a group of alpha males and females who often can get too far out in front and in their zeal may not think it all the way through. That's a nice problem to have."

Batvinis' task force eventually incorporated dozens of agents and intel professionals, including people from the Treasury Department and the IRS. "We were working hand in glove with NSA," Batvinis said. That kind of cooperation proved crucial. "The one ace in the hole that we had were those voices, that conversation," a recording of Pelton's phone call five years earlier, when he had called up Soviet embassy to offer up his services. Now Batvinis needed to play the tape for current NSA employees to see if anyone could identify the speaker. They formed a list of 70 to 80 people, Batvinis estimated, who worked at the NSA but "who we were confident were not the people. You were rolling the dice a little bit because you couldn't play the tape for the guy who was the [spy]. But you had to run that risk."

Pairing an FBI agent with an NSA security officer, they played the tape for dozens of NSA employees. One man only listened to the tape for a few seconds before he asked the agents to turn it off.

"I know who that is," Donald Bacon said. "That's Ronald Pelton."

An agent asked if he wanted to listen to it again to make sure.

"No, no, that's Pelton," Bacon affirmed.

How do you know?

"He was in my carpool."

Other NSA employees, with varying degrees of certainty, pegged Ronald Pelton as the speaker on the recording. And the FBI and NSA could now rest somewhat easier knowing that the spy they were looking for no longer had access to agency secrets.

This was when the FBI decided that they needed to talk to Yurchenko again, to show him a mug book that included both current and former NSA employees. They were able to send an agent out to Arizona to meet Yurchenko, but the plan didn't go down easily. "We pushed the envelope," Batvinis said. "We forced our own headquarters and CIA to allow our case agents to sit down with him. That's not normally done." Still, they now had positive IDs from several NSA employees and Yurchenko, who had briefly met Pelton. It was enough to put the former NSA cryptanalyst under surveillance.

"We had surveillance on him for almost two months, twenty-four hours a day," Batvinis said. "We put a wiretap on [Pelton's] girlfriend's phone," in her apartment, in his car. The amount of surveillance was unusual, sometimes involving up to 200 agents. "The Department of Justice went out on a limb, thinking with the idea that maybe he was still in contact with [the Soviets]. It was pretty thin. But we got the wire because the stakes were so high."

Digging through Pelton's life, a grim image began to form of a damaged man struggling to keep himself together. The FBI agents listening to his phone calls could hear him being cruel to his wife, even as she tried to reconcile with him. "He had larceny in his heart anyway," Batvinis said. "This isn't some guy who had some negative epiphany and went off the rails." He outlined the sad state of Pelton's world at that point: "His life had deteriorated down to sex, drugs, and rock n roll. He abandoned his wife. He was sleeping on a boat, trying to make chicken salad out of you know what. But we also caught him defrauding his own friend, his own buddy. Before we sat him down to interview him, he was already facing a bank fraud charge — major, to the tune of about fifty to sixty thousand dollars. We were able to make that case against him, but that's not what we wanted."

What the FBI, and the NSA, wanted was to get enough evidence to charge Pelton with espionage, with the hope that he would either plead guilty or be convicted. Then the real work could begin: learning exactly which sources and methods Pelton had compromised. "The pressure that was on us was to charge him and to hopefully convict," Batvinis said, "so that NSA could sit him down and say, 'All right, what did you give up?'

"We knew where he was twenty-four hours a day," Batvinis said. "We were picking up voices, conversations in the car, so we knew all about him. We were right in his head. But it was a question of having him" confess.

Getting Pelton to confess wasn't such an improbable idea. Batvinis' case agents knew "that this guy was a salesman. And despite all his failures, he had an enormous ego. So what he would try to do is talk his way out of it. Which is perfect. Because the more he talked, the more he talked himself into it."

To do that, they would have to set the scene with some care. The FBI rented a room at the Hilton hotel in Annapolis. Two FBI agents, Dudley "Butch" Hodgson and David Faulkner, would engage Pelton. They decided to dress casually, without their sidearms. They set up chairs in the room and a spread of coffee and donuts. The point was to make Pelton feel as if he was in a "non-custodial environment," that he could leave whenever he wanted.

The FBI agents also managed to get the NSA to bring some files related to the operations that Pelton had possibly compromised. This was more set-dressing. It was all "so that Pelton could see them," Batvinis said. "They were never referred to. He could see the code names on [the files]. That was used as a prop. They were closely guarded. No one was going to get to them. Our guys weren't even going to look at them. They didn't have the clearances for it."

On the morning of November 24, Faulkner called Pelton at the boat sales office where he worked. (Pelton had spent the previous night sleeping on his boss's boat.) Faulkner asked Pelton to meet him to discuss a matter of national security. Pelton soon showed up at the Hilton, where he met the two FBI agents in room 409. The agents said, "We want to tell you a story, and we don't want you to interrupt us until we're finished with the story." They began telling the story of an unnamed stranger whose life mirrored that of Pelton's — born in Michigan, Air Force, marriage, NSA, four children, and so on. The story continued until the moment when this mystery person called the Soviet embassy. Then the agents played the tape of Pelton calling the Soviet embassy on January 14, 1980. Upon hearing the five-year-old recording, Pelton's hands started to shake, spilling his coffee. He told the agents that they probably thought that was him but it wasn't.

"You know," Hodgson replied. "I did two tours in Vietnam. I heard a lot of shells going off. I gotta tell you, Ron, that sounds an awful lot like you."

Pelton flew into dissembling and denial. The agents came to his rescue, telling him that he was desperate, that he was trying to help his family, that they understood. They asked Pelton if he was still in contact with the Soviets. "No," he said. "But I can be."

Pelton offered to become a double agent — a fact that he would try to use later in his defense. The agents said that such decisions were made at a higher level, and besides, they needed to know what he had done before such a deal could be made. Pelton said that someone in this position would be crazy not to talk to a lawyer — the closest he seemed to get to requesting one. The agents replied that he could do that but that they had to push forward with their investigation.

The FBI never intended to make a deal with Pelton or to turn him into a double agent. They wanted him to confess. The agents told him they knew he gave up Ivy Bells. Pelton began to talk. By the time he left the hotel, the agents were high-fiving each other with joy. (According to FBI policy at the time, the conversation between Pelton, Dudley, and Hodgson wasn't recorded. Batvinis and other agents, including a polygraph expert, were in nearby rooms on the same floor.) The agents had been careful to make no promises to Pelton while also priming him to talk. They spoke vaguely of "cooperation" and said that they had to know what he had given up. As Pelton would later testify at his trial, it felt like he was in a "Catch-22." He had to tell the agents something in order to show his cooperation, but by doing so, he could easily incriminate himself.

Pelton had a lunch date with his girlfriend Ann, and the agents agreed to let him depart. Hodgson and Faulkner walked him out to his car. Bottles of liquor lay in the front passenger seat. Pelton showed the agents his passport and agreed to surrender it. Pelton drove off. He continued to be under constant surveillance, his every move and word monitored. FBI agents saw as Pelton and Barry went to buy Dilaudid and then returned home. That night, FBI agents called Pelton at Barry's apartment and said that it was urgent that they speak to him again. Pelton agreed to meet with them at the hotel. Bugs in Barry's apartment picked up the couple's ensuing argument. Barry was angry that the FBI had called at her home and feared that she might be in trouble as well. Pelton tried to calm her, claiming that he might become a double agent; perhaps he even believed this self-serving fiction. As he got ready to leave, Pelton asked Barry to pray for him. She refused. "This is not the Boy Scouts," he said, and walked out the door for the last time.

That night at the Annapolis Hilton, Hodgson and Faulkner pushed Pelton, finally getting him to admit that he had given up classified information. Hodgson leaned on the former NSA analyst, telling him that he knew that he had harmed American national security and put people at risk. For the purposes of an espionage charge, this was an important distinction; they needed Pelton to admit both that he gave up information to a foreign power and that he knew it would harm the country. Pelton, nearing his limit, hung his head in shame and offered his reluctant agreement.

Later in his defense, Pelton would claim that the agents had taken advantage of him, that he had been drinking and taking Dilaudid in the hours after the first meeting, so he wasn't in a clear frame of mind when he returned that evening to the hotel. But members of the FBI surveillance team took the stand and claimed that they had followed Pelton all day, including when he went to Ann's apartment, and that he had never swerved or shown signs of being intoxicated. Surveillance did indicate that the couple made a drug buy in the afternoon and injected Dilaudid in the early evening after they returned to Barry's home.

Not long after Pelton admitted that his actions had harmed the United States, the FBI agents handcuffed him and announced that he was under arrest. It was minutes before midnight. Pelton, who in his various evasions and desperate attempts at salesmanship still might have believed that he had a chance at becoming a double agent, was in shock. "You guys don't have a case," he said.

Butch Hodgson, an FBI legend in his time for his experience working undercover and his salty humor, had a ready rejoinder: "Yeah, Ron, and those aren't real handcuffs."

Media Coverage and Threats of Prosecution
Pelton's arrest was immediately front-page news, but it took some time for the media, and the public, to grasp the scope of the case and the damage done. Jonathan Pollard had been nabbed just four days earlier, the Walker spy ring was wound up in May, and several other notable espionage cases concluded that summer. No one had yet branded 1985 the Year of the Spy, but it was clear that a flurry of counter-intelligence activity was underway, leading to an unprecedented cluster of espionage cases. For most Americans, the NSA was still a mystery, a fearsome colossus at the center of the intelligence community that few knew much, if anything, about. For the agency itself, Pelton's betrayal was perhaps the worst it had ever suffered and thrust it uncomfortably into the public eye. Throughout this period, the Reagan administration tried to crack down on press leaks — a year earlier, Samuel Loring Morison was convicted of theft of government property and espionage for leaking three classified satellite photographs to Jane's Defence Weekly. Morison, who had been a naval intelligence analyst with a sideline in writing for defense-industry publications like Jane's, became the first government employee successfully prosecuted for giving information to the media.

The press environment, then, was unusually hostile. Already seeking to reassert the intelligence community's autonomy, especially after the years in the wilderness under Presidents Ford and Carter, the Reagan administration was just as determined to protect its secrets. Officials feared the consequences of a public trial, which might force it to reveal information about the secrets Pelton had given away.

Despite the burgeoning tension, establishment journalists like Bob Woodward were on intimate terms with senior figures in the administration. Woodward knew CIA Director Bill Casey particularly well and was working on a book about him, which would later be published as "Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987." While the Reagan administration may have wanted to limit leaks, that didn't mean that administration officials didn't meet with journalists to discuss issues on and off the record, sometimes seeking to shape coverage or policy. The relationship was murky and adversarial, with each trying to wring information out of the other. All of which meant that, while insiders like Woodward were well positioned to report the Pelton story, they were also risking a potentially unprecedented backlash from a group of hardened Cold Warriors who were determined to keep their secrets safe. The contours of this conflict, and how far administration officials were willing to go in pressuring the media, soon became apparent.

With the administration already angered about their reporting on the CIA's activities in Central America and North Africa, reporters at the Washington Post were on guard. Woodward's boss, executive editor Ben Bradlee, told him that their phones "might be tapped." In meetings and phone calls, Lieutenant General Odom, the Director of the NSA, warned Woodward and his colleagues of the potential consequences of the story. Still, the reporters pressed ahead, pursuing the Pelton story for months, talking with officials from throughout the intelligence community. They focused on Ivy Bells, the most important code-word program that they knew Pelton had revealed to his Soviet paymasters. Woodward eventually showed copies of his Ivy Bells story to Odom and to White House officials. He discussed it with Director Casey at a DC society party and consulted with other senior intelligence officials, including some who had retired but knew about the program (and the stakes of reporting on it).

Bradlee, who sometimes wondered whether the United States' aggressive espionage programs threatened to tip the country into open conflict with the Soviet Union, tried to give the government a fair hearing. He told his star reporter that perhaps there would be consequences they couldn't foresee. Sure, the Soviets clearly knew about the tap, but their reporting could accidentally compromise other programs or inflame the issue by drawing unwanted attention to it — a serious concern when Reagan was trying to establish common ground with Mikhail Gorbachev, the newly installed leader of the Soviet Communist Party. The Post's journalists were in a difficult position, having revealed their hand to the Reagan administration while also taking seriously the warnings that their reporting might threaten national security. "The unusual act of presenting multiple drafts of the story to the NSA and the White House had revealed our hesitation and uncertainty," Woodward later reflected.

Finally, on April 25, 1986, Ben Bradlee called the White House to inform them that the story would be published two days later. The administration, naturally, objected. Odom called Bradlee again to warn him off, but this time the NSA Director admitted that the Soviets knew all about Ivy Bells but that perhaps the story would reveal information that other nations, even allies, didn't know. By then, Bradlee had talked to officials throughout the government and he wasn't convinced by Odom's argument, but he agreed to hold the story until the two spoke again. Bradlee and Odom had breakfast on Thursday, May 1, and Bradlee made clear that his team had already crossed the rubicon: they planned to publish. Odom didn't seem to object strongly, but he did float to Bradlee that high-ranking officials had discussed using a 1950 law to charge journalists who published classified information. The law had never been used, but it potentially had wide application, as it prohibited publication of classified information "prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States or for the benefit of any foreign government to the detriment of the United States." It also specifically proscribed the publication of information related to cryptographic systems and the collection of communications intelligence, which could fairly describe Ivy Bells.

The day after Bradlee and Odom spoke, Bill Casey met with D. Lowell Jensen, the deputy attorney general who oversaw the Justice Department's Criminal Division. Casey put forth the very idea Odom had mentioned: it was time to prosecute some journalists for publishing all these leaked secrets. Telling the reluctant Jensen that they had to project toughness, Casey proposed prosecutions against reporters from five major newspapers and magazines. He also wanted to get a court order to stop the Post from publishing its Ivy Bells story.

Later that day, Casey invited Bradlee to meet him for a drink. Bradlee allowed the spy chief to take a look at a draft of the story. Casey read it and calmly told Bradlee, "I'm not threatening you, but you've got to know that if you publish this, I would recommend that you be prosecuted." (Of course, Casey's remark sounds very much like a threat.) He told Bradlee about his meeting earlier that day with the Justice Department. Later Casey pulled out the national security official's ultimate trump card: he told Bradlee that publishing the story could endanger people on the front lines of the intelligence war. It's the sort of claim that journalists dealing with high-level national security stories are often forced to take on faith, if not trust.

Casey's various warnings prompted Bradlee to once again put a hold on the story, as he huddled with the paper's lawyers. Woodward and his colleague Patrick Tyler thought that the story's potential damage — at least to national security — was overblown. "It had been laundered down to a mere rag," Woodward wrote. This was what governments do. They fiercely defend their secrets and their perceived interests, while it's the media's obligation to push back.

What Casey hadn't counted on, however, was that he had revealed something important to Bradlee: the government was considering using a decades-old law to prosecute journalists for doing their jobs. For Bradlee, for colleagues at other publications, and for the wider public, that was news. And there had been no mention of their discussion being off the record. To Casey's displeasure, the Post went ahead and published a story reporting that the Reagan administration was considering bringing charges against journalists from the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New York Times, Newsweek, and Time. It also mentioned the effort to suppress a Post story about the Pelton case. That prompted follow-up stories, including from the New York Times, which provided a fuller picture of the debate between Post journalists and government officials.

The dance continued. On May 10, President Reagan called Katharine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post, and asked her not to publish the Ivy Bells story. Graham, who seemed to come away at least partially convinced, called it "a very civilized, low-key conversation." But she eventually deferred to Bradlee, who pledged that the story reflected a five-year-old intelligence failure and wouldn't cause any kind of damage. The Post still didn't publish, and nine days later, they were scooped when NBC journalist James Polk reported on television that Pelton had exposed Ivy Bells, a submarine surveillance operation in Soviet territory. After two more days, on May 21, the Post published their own Ivy Bells story, which Woodward simply called "truncated." Bradlee told the New York Times that the article had been edited down significantly. "Some people are disappointed, and others are pleased," he said.

On May 22, Pelton's trial began. Casey and Odom issued a joint statement warning journalists against "speculation" about secret activities. Casey recommended Polk, the NBC journalist, for prosecution, but later in public, he walked back some of his remarks in an apparent attempt to eliminate the impression that the administration was cracking down on freedom of the press. That likely was a relief to Justice Department officials, who showed less of an appetite to prosecute journalists for their reporting. By the end of May, the threat of prosecution had receded, but the Ivy Bells saga cast into relief how seriously the Reagan administration took its intelligence activities. It didn't matter that Woodward and his colleagues were trying to uncover information that had been given to the Soviets years earlier. In the intelligence community, once information was classified, it was meant to stay that way.

A Trial Without Evidence
Ronald Pelton's espionage trial was in many ways unusual. There were no witnesses to his alleged crimes, no one who could testify to seeing Pelton meeting with Russian agents. Vitaly Yurchenko had already fled back to the Soviet Union, where he was given a medal and installed in a desk job where he could do no harm. There was no physical evidence — only circumstantial details like trips to Vienna and bank transactions. Ann Barry, Pelton's girlfriend, knew he was mixed up in something clandestine but nothing else. There were the recorded embassy calls, in which the caller promised interesting information, but the defense could argue that they couldn't prove that was Pelton or that the information being discussed had nothing to do with spying. The entire case would hinge on what Pelton said to FBI agents in that Annapolis hotel room and on a jury believing the agents' testimony.

First, the government had to figure out how to get the case to trial at all. Generally, the government preferred that spies plead guilty and then cooperate for a reduced sentence, thus allowing intelligence agencies and policymakers to know which systems and assets had been compromised. With this kind of cooperation, the state could avoid a public trial that might reveal embarrassing lapses in security or, more consequentially, classified information. There was a kind of paradox involved: for the government to prove that Pelton sold classified information to a foreign power, it would need to describe some of what he sold. The state would have to produce in court some of the very information it wished to keep secret. And there was hardly an agency whose work was considered more sensitive than that of the NSA. The prosecution, led by Assistant United States Attorney John Douglass and Assistant United States Attorney Robert McDonald, would have to negotiate fine-grained evidentiary rules with the judge and Pelton's defense. Even Pelton would have to agree to them. He planned to testify, and the government didn't want him unnecessarily revealing classified information in court. There were also frequent meetings with Elizabeth Rindskopf, the general counsel for the NSA, who naturally had an interest in withholding as much as possible about her agency's top-secret projects, including their codenames. As part of the overall agreement, Douglass and company decided to introduce the five main projects Pelton had allegedly compromised as Project A, B, C, D, and E. These projects would be described in general terms by NSA personnel testifying for the prosecution, but the jury would not be privy to all relevant classified information. The end result would be to present an unusual, albeit limited, look inside the country's most secretive intelligence agency — all in the service of convicting a man who, as one FBI agent testified, helped the Soviets get "to know the inner workings of the N.S.A." Once again, the logic was almost vertiginous: to protect the NSA's secrets, the government would have to expose some of them in open court.

Pelton was represented by Fred Warren Bennett, a fiery public defender known for vigorously contesting death penalty cases. Bennett was then in the midst of a decorated legal career that saw him become one of the more prominent criminal defenders in the Maryland area. He had recently represented John Walker Jr., who pleaded guilty so that his son would receive a reduced sentence. A certain intensity and attention to detail were hallmarks of Bennett's courtroom behavior. His law partner, Gary E. Bair — who, as a former Maryland solicitor general, had faced off against Bennett in court before joining his practice — told the Washington Post, "He was aggressive, tenacious. He treated every motion, every evidentiary ruling, every little point as if it were the most important thing. A lot of lawyers might say, 'I'm going to let that point go to concentrate on a more important thing.'" But not Fred Bennett.

Bennett brought his famed tenacity to the Pelton trial. As the government's lawyers tried to carefully marshal a case that Pelton had disclosed important secrets — while avoiding revealing much about the contents of those secrets — Bennett threw out objection after objection and asked for frequent bench consultations. He pointed out the problem of the over-classification of government secrets. "Is not the mere phone book within NSA... a classified document?" he asked a witness. Some of the programs that Pelton allegedly compromised, like Project A (aka Ivy Bells), only operated intermittently, Bennett noted. And Pelton had apparently circled the wrong spot on a map to indicate the location of the Ivy Bells tap. Still, the government could easily reply that the Ivy Bells tap ran intermittently because it was so dangerous to access, which only emphasized its importance as a source of intelligence. And as for Pelton's mark on the map missing the tap's location in the Sea of Okhotsk, it seemed that the Soviets were still able to discover and disable the tap, and Pelton's information may very well have helped.

The opposing counsel seemed to admire Bennett's moxie. After Bennett told the court that he was going to file some motions before a weekend recess, AUSDA John Douglass replied, with some evident humor, "Your honor, all I can say is I appreciate Mr. Bennett's effort. I can't think of a thing I had to do this weekend anyway." Years later, Douglass told me that Bennett was a "well regarded, experienced, a very able defense lawyer [who] did a terrific job running the federal public defenders office in Maryland."

Despite Bennett's best efforts, the conditions favored the prosecution. There was little material evidence connecting Pelton to espionage, but the testimony of the FBI agents who interviewed Pelton was crucial. The meetings with Faulkner and Hodgson hadn't been recorded, but the agents' testimony would go a long way. They recounted how Pelton, either out of desperation or a belief that he could somehow escape the situation by becoming a double agent, admitted his betrayal. On the stand, FBI agent David Faulkner said that Pelton told him, "The Soviets got more out of me than I wanted to give up."

This was precisely the KGB's specialty. "I was taken for a serious ride," said Michael Walker, son of convicted Soviet spy John Walker, in a jailhouse interview. For assisting in his espionage, Michael's father promised him $5,000 a month but paid him about $1,000 in total. This sense of resentment and exploitation, of being treated like an unappreciated employee, is a recurrent feature among traitors. Spies often promise their agents more than they can, or are willing, to deliver, and the promise of an impending payday can sometimes keep the secrets flowing. (It's also worth noting that common motivating factors for spies include a sense of professional grievance and financial insecurity.) Ronald Pelton only made about $35,000 from his espionage — not even enough to cover all of his debts.

"They basically squeezed him for all the juice he had," Raymond Batvinis said. "It's really part of their tradecraft. They don't want to get the guy well. They want to keep him on the hook. They want him coming back. So if you need ten thousand, they'll give you five." Or they might invoke other stalling tactics, like claiming they need to check the authenticity of the purloined material before they can pay out any money. Even the millions paid to the John Walker spy ring, especially when amortized out over the many years that Walker and company spied, didn't amount to much. The Soviets "got the biggest bargain in the world," Batvinis said.

Over the course of the trial, the prosecution presented Pelton as someone whose keen memory, wide knowledge of SIGINT operations, and access to top secret and special compartmented programs would make him a devastating spy. (Compartmented programs are above top secret, their details only shared with those who need to know.) Donald Bacon, the former Pelton co-worker who carpooled with him for a couple years, and who identified his voice on the embassy tape, said that someone of Pelton's status "would have as broad an access as I could describe." Pelton had authored a kind of reference book that described the dozens of Soviet signals to which the NSA had access, and he was involved in budget planning and procurement for his department, meaning that he knew about future projects and how resources were allocated. He was considered intelligent, capable, someone who got things done. As would happen during the trial of Jonathan Pollard, witnesses cited his "excellent memory" and his ability "to retain information that had happened many years previously" — the implication being that Pelton didn't need access to physical documents to commit espionage. He had them stored in his head.

Pelton took the stand in his own defense and was later cross-examined by Douglass. In his testimony, Pelton presented himself as having been trapped by the FBI agents, who made an implicit promise that he could become a double agent. He had to tell them something in order to encourage cooperation. What's more, he claimed, he was in a fragile state. "I was feeling pretty mellow," he said. "I had done some reasonably heavy drinking and some drugs." (Faulkner, in turn, had testified that Pelton told him he had only had two drinks and that Pelton didn't seem intoxicated.) When asked to explain why he had signed a waiver of his rights during the session with Faulker and Hodgson, Pelton replied, "I know I was tired. The questions were coming left, right, sideways. I guess I really didn't comprehend."

On the stand, Pelton denied that he told the agents that he had shared information with the Soviets on Projects B through E. As for Project A, otherwise known as Ivy Bells, Pelton admitted that he had shared some information about it but that his knowledge was mostly confined to the recording system, which he had worked on. (That might explain how Pelton marked the wrong place on the map to indicate the project's location.) He also said that people who serviced the tap might face "some personal jeopardy," which amounted to an admission that his disclosures endangered lives. While Pelton expressed some confusion about his meeting with the FBI agents, overall he came across as lucid, intelligent, and possessing good recall — precisely the attributes that made him a damaging spy, the authorities argued. And while he admitted he felt pressured into talking to the FBI, he knew his disclosures to them were voluntary.

Pelton's testimony would do him no favors. On June 5, 1986, the jury returned verdicts of guilty on four charges and innocent on another. A sixth charge was dismissed. Pelton appealed his conviction, but he also agreed to cooperate with investigators in hopes of receiving a reduced sentence. During this time, he was jailed at the Anne Arundel County Detention Center. Most days, FBI agents would pick up Pelton and take him to the Naval Air Station in Patuxent River, Maryland. They took him down to an admiral's cabin on the base, which stood isolated on a small isthmus in the river. Like the room at the Hilton hotel, the place was chosen so as to put Pelton at ease and encourage his cooperation. "Beautiful, beautiful little cabin. Two bedrooms, parlor kind of an area, small kitchen and whatnot," Batvinis said. "It was perfect. Completely isolated." Having been convicted and knowing that his appeal was a long shot, Pelton became more cooperative. "He told us everything."

The atmosphere was almost like a summer cookout. One day, they grilled up hot dogs and hamburgers. "Just to get him into a mindset where he's part of a team so to speak, as opposed to us being the bad guys," Batvinis said. The debriefing sessions were led by Hodgson, Faulkner, and an NSA officer, but there were subject-matter experts brought in from various areas of government to talk to Pelton and learn exactly what he gave up. The collective conclusion was that Pelton did serious damage, perhaps more than any other traitor in NSA history. He had told the Soviets about specific programs, like Ivy Bells, and methods of SIGINT collection. But he had also explained what the US government and intelligence community weren't capable of — information that could be just as important as learning about a previously unknown surveillance capability.

The government got a great deal out of Pelton in these debriefing sessions, but there remained a nagging concern that Pelton was holding back. In the early years after his conviction, rumors passed through natsec and journalistic circles that Pelton might face another prosecution, based on evidence that wasn't available at his trial. On the other hand, more charges and another court case could bring more leaks, secrets discussed in open court, and embarrassment for the state for not having to go through these procedures again.

In 1987, Dan Devereux found himself tapping this vein of rumor and suspicion. A Korean War veteran and an investigative journalist in Phoenix, Devereux was a regular on the crime beat. He had done important work on the murder of Don Bolles, a reporter for the Arizona Republic who was assassinated in a car-bombing, likely for his coverage of powerful business and criminal figures. Devereux was in touch with a convict who had been a jailhouse source for him when he did time in Arizona. After committing a string of crimes, this source was now imprisoned in Pennsylvania, where he had gotten to know a man named Ronald Pelton. According to the source, Pelton was interested in talking to a journalist and telling his story (which may have included information about his crimes). Devereux familiarized himself with the case and told his source that he would talk to Pelton. And that was the last thing that Devereux would hear on the subject for three years.

Devereux wasn't the only person interested in what Pelton had to say. When the FBI learned that Pelton might be talking to a journalist — and might be revealing information that had been suppressed during his trial — the Bureau and the Justice Department decided to act. In the spring of 1987, a woman who called herself Janet Crawford came to the prison where Pelton was housed. She said she was a lawyer for the Scottsdale Progress, a newspaper to which Devereux contributed. She met with Pelton twice, leaving with notes the convicted spy had typed up in prison.

It turned out that Crawford was a fiction, an identity cooked up by the FBI. Butch Hodgson admitted as much in a 1990 phone call with Devereux. And by presenting herself as a lawyer, she could promise Pelton attorney-client privilege and that his writings would be safe with her. "That is how she could get in there without being searched," Hodgson said. The typed documents that Pelton gave "Crawford" were, Hodgson said, "of a highly classified nature, major stuff that hadn't even been gone into in his original trial."

Hodgson's job had been to help build another case. But the government didn't like what it found. "The stuff that he provided was so sensitive that the Justice Department didn't feel that they could go ahead and go to trial again," Hodgson said.

In a later conversation, Devereux described feeling a sense of violation and outrage at the FBI's conduct. A self-proclaimed patriot, he said that he might have cooperated with the FBI if they had approached him first and asked for his help in securing Pelton's writings. But Devereux was also a dedicated reporter who had dealt with the FBI in some of his previous investigations, and he had a sense of how the Bureau could abuse its authority. He was disturbed that the FBI would impersonate a journalist, or his representative, and would abuse attorney-client privilege.

For three years, Devereux tried to unravel what happened between him, the FBI, his jailhouse source, and Ronald Pelton. As part of his investigation, he enlisted the aid of some first amendment organizations, who agreed with his argument that impersonating journalists threatened their safety and autonomy, especially when they work in dangerous areas. He sent letters to his senator, John McCain, who, using his oversight authority as a member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, charged the FBI with producing a report on what happened. The FBI eventually absolved itself of wrongdoing, and so did the Senate Select Committee. In a letter to McCain, Senators David Boren and William Cohen, fellow committee members, wrote, "The FBI appears to have handled this highly unusual situation in a reasonable way." In the following years, William Sessions, the director of the FBI, refused to rule out the possibility of undercover agents impersonating doctors, clergy, lawyers, and other traditionally protected classes. It's a practice that remains in place to this day.

Re-entering A Changed World
Besides Don Devereux, Ronald Pelton never made contact with a journalist, never explained his actions. After serving the mandatory thirty years, Pelton was paroled on a chilly November day, just before Thanksgiving in 2015. He had spent the previous few months in a Maryland halfway house, a sort of pre-release rehabilitation center from which he was allowed to sign out during the day. Convicted spy Jonathan Pollard, who had been arrested the same week as Pelton, was paroled several days earlier to much media attention. The same couldn't be said for Pelton, whose release barely merited a mention in an Associated Press wire report. The ex-spy, who had worked in the machine shop in a medium-security division of the same Pennsylvania prison that housed Aldrich Ames, was released to a grim future. He was 74 years old, he had no money or resources, he had alienated much of his family. The Cold War was finished and he had had the bad luck to spy for the loser, for a country that didn't exist anymore and had little regard for the fate of one of its former assets. Pelton was, according to one source, going to be living with his daughter in Maryland. The few years he had left would probably be devoted to wondering how his life had gone so drastically wrong.

In the view of former FBI agent Raymond Batvinis, Pelton got what he deserved, but he wasn't beyond sympathy. "His life is over. Thirty years in prison, you get accustomed to prison," Batvinis said. "But now I'm almost seventy, and I realize how precious life is. Yes, the Cold War is over. The Soviet Union is gone. Russia is not the existential threat that it was. A life is so precious. He's lost thirty years. He's going to be sleeping on his daughter's couch for the rest of his life. Let bygones be bygones. Same with Pollard."

Philip Ambler, Pelton's former supervisor at the NSA, disagrees. He was "shocked," he said, when he learned that Pelton's life sentence only meant he would be in jail for thirty years. In his opinion, and that of some of his colleagues, Pelton committed a grave offense and should never be free again. Emphasizing the role of secrecy in the culture of the NSA, Ambler sounded a note of personal betrayal. At times, he seemed lost as to how to explain his anger, still simmering after thirty years. "It was really, really bad," Ambler said. "Obviously. It was really bad that he did what he did. That's all I can say." About one thing though he was certain: Ronald Pelton, he said, was "a fucking traitor."