American Spies: Espionage against the United States from the Cold War to the Present

2 Spies in the Enlisted Ranks

25 2 Spies in the Enlisted Ranks Once global threats had been avoided, the time for national missions and civic loyalties had returned and the great idealistic spies finally disappeared from the scene. . . . After that, payment became the norm. ALEXANDER FEKLISOV, the Rosenbergs’ case officer, quoted in Alexander Feklisov, Man behind the Rosenbergs, 59 Both Soviet intelligence agencies, the KGB and GRU, moved quickly to find a new generation of American spies. Prospects of recruiting the bonanza of well-placed spies in policy circles from the previous two decades were dim, but American policy toward the Soviet Union was hardly a secret. The policy was openly adversarial, and the key question for the Soviets was when and if tensions would flare up in a military clash. As a result, the Soviet intelligence services shifted their emphasis to stealing American military secrets to give the Red Army an advantage in the event that an armed conflict erupted. The KGB and GRU found a new pool of potential recruits among America ’s enlisted military. The Soviet intelligence services realized they would find few with communist sympathies and instead focused on character flaws and vulnerabilities that might be exploited to lure military personnel to spy. In the consumer society of the 1950s, the enlisted military man could scarcely afford the car, the home, the leisure time diversions, and the new The Cold War: 1950–70 26 time-saving gadgets that were now staples of the average civilian’s lifestyle. Unlike the spies of the Soviets’ Golden Age, the new generation of American traitors was predominantly military and overwhelmingly motivated by money. Paradoxically, some of these uniformed spies would still profess love for their country and rationalized their espionage as a petty crime, a quick business deal little more than selling stolen goods from a military commissary on the black market. The heavy post–World War II US military presence in Europe also offered the Soviets a distinct advantage because theKGBandGRUcouldspotandcultivatetargetsfarfromtheFBI’sintense monitoring of their activities on American soil. Nelson Drummond Nelson Drummond, an African American navy yeoman, was just the kind of recruit the Soviets hunted in Europe. Drummond was assigned to a US Navy base outside London in 1958 when a GRU officer approached him on the street in a classic recruitment operation.1 The Soviets had learned that the twenty-seven-year-old sailor from Baltimore was a drinker, gambler, and hustler who had incurred heavy debts since arriving in the United Kingdom. More important, the Soviets knew that Drummond was a clerk with access to classified documents on US weapons systems and NATO defenses. The GRU officer developed the case slowly, first offering the debtridden Drummond money in exchange for a US Navy pass to shop in the commissary. Soon Drummond was persuaded to pass secret documents to the GRU. By then, he was dependent on his GRU cash supplements. When his tour ended in London, Drummond was assigned to a Mobile Electronic Technical Unit at Naval Station Newport in Rhode Island, where he continued to have access to military secrets. He began to exhibit behavior that is typical of many American spies flush with newfound cash from spying. On his yeoman’s monthly salary of about $120, he was able to buy two cars and his own business, a bar outside the naval base. Aside from flaunting his unexplained wealth, he also got into scrapes with the law. Between 1960 and 1961, he was arrested for drunken driving, illegal gambling , and twice on assault charges, hardly the low-profile behavior expected of a spy. Spies in the Enlisted Ranks 27 Drummond was among the four American spies identified by Dmitriy Polyakov in the early 1960s.2 The FBI could not use the information from a productive spy like Polyakov to make the case, but Drummond’s unexplained wealth and careless tradecraft provided enough evidence to catch him in the act of passing secrets. The FBI began to follow Drummond to New York City, where he met his GRU contacts once a month and where agents discovered bank accounts with inordinately high balances. In 1962, the FBI trailed Drummond to a diner in Westchester County and arrested him and two GRU officers in the middle of a clandestine meeting. In August 1963, Drummond was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. His espionage reportedly required $200 million to revise the plans, procedures, and manuals he had compromised.3...