Recent Major U.S. Espionage Cases

Thursday, March 8, 2001; 1:43 PM

•  Former CIA agent David H. Barnett pleaded guilty in 1980 to spying for the Soviet Union between 1976 and 1979 while based in Indonesia. The first current or former CIA agent convicted of espionage, Barnett admitted exposing the identities of 30 U.S. agents.

•  Richard William Miller was a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who was arrested for passing classified documents to two pro-Soviet immigrants, who also were arrested and pleaded guilty to conspiracy. Miller pleaded innocent, saying he was trying to infiltrate the KGB. His first trial ended in a mistrial, but he was found guilty in second trial in 1986. That verdict was overturned in 1989 on a technicality. In a third trial, he was convicted again and sentenced to 20 years in 1991. He was released in 1994 after a federal judge reduced his sentence.

•  Former CIA clerk Sharon Scranage pleaded guilty in 1985 to disclosing the names of U.S. agents to her Ghanaian boyfriend. Scranage served the CIA in Ghana.

•  Former CIA officer Edward Lee Howard fled the country in 1985 as the FBI was investigating him for spying for the Soviet Union. Howard, who is accused of disclosing the identities of CIA agents in Moscow, turned up in the Soviet Union in 1986, where he still lives. He eluded FBI surveillance of his home in Santa Fe, N.M., where he worked for the New Mexico Legislature.

The CIA withheld from the FBI its suspicions about Howard, who had been fired in 1983 after failing a lie-detector test.

•  Retired Navy Warrant Officer John A. Walker Jr. pleaded guilty in 1985 along with his son, Navy Seaman Michael L. Walker, 22, to charges of spying for the Soviet Union. Walker admitted passing secrets to the Soviets while he was a shipboard communications officer and after his retirement by recruiting his son, brother and a friend to provide fresh information.

Walker's brother, Arthur Walker, a retired Navy lieutenant commander, was convicted in 1985 of stealing secret documents from a defense contractor and giving them to John A. Walker Jr. for delivery to the Soviets.

Another member of the ring, Jerry A. Whitworth, a Navy chief petty officer, was convicted in 1986 of passing secret Navy codes to Walker.

•  Former National Security Agency employee Ronald W. Pelton was convicted in 1986 of selling top-secret signals intelligence information to the Soviet Union.

•  Jonathan Jay Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in 1986 to spying for Israel. He is serving a life sentence, which President Clinton refused to commute despite pleas from the Israeli government.

•  Foreign Service officer Felix Bloch was suspended in 1989 by the State Department after reportedly being monitored by video camera passing a suitcase to a Soviet agent in Paris. Bloch, who was once charge d'affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, was not charged with espionage, but was fired in 1990 on the grounds that he lied to investigators.

•  Aldrich H. Ames, a CIA counterintelligence official, and his wife, Rosario, pleaded guilty in 1994 to spying for the Soviet Union in the most damaging espionage case in U.S. history. Ames passed information to the Soviets from 1985 to 1994, including the identities of U.S. agents. He is blamed for the deaths of at least nine U.S. agents in the Soviet Union, and for disclosing U.S. counterintelligence techniques.

•  CIA Officer Harold James Nicholson was arrested by the FBI in November 1996 and charged with committing espionage on behalf of Russia. Nicholson was arrested at a Washington airport en route to a clandestine meeting in Europe with his Russian intelligence handlers. At the time of his arrest, he was carrying rolls of exposed film which contained Secret and Top Secret information. In March 1997, Nicholson pleaded guilty to the charges, and he was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

•  A 13-year veteran of the FBI, Earl Edwin Pitts contacted the KGB in 1987 to offer his services and continued selling secrets to the Russians until 1992. He supposedly received $224,000 for his services. Tipped off by a Russian double agent, the FBI launched a sting operation of Pitts in 1995 in which agents posing as his Russian handlers paid Pitts $65,000 in exchange for classified FBI information. Arrested in December 1996, the 43-year-old Pitts pleaded guilty to espionage charges in 1997 and was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

•  A former Army signals analyst for the National Security Agency, David Boone was arrested in October 1998 and charged with selling classified documents to the Soviet Union between 1988 and 1991, including a list of Russian sites targeted by U.S. nuclear weapons. According to the FBI, Boone was under financial difficulties and volunteered his services to the Soviets by walking into the Soviet Embassy in Washington in October 1988.

Boone was indicted on three counts of espionage. In December 1998, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy, and in February 1999, he was sentenced to 24 years and four months in prison. Under a plea agreement, Boone was also required to forfeit $52,000 and a hand-held scanner he used to copy documents.

•  Wen Ho Lee was accused of spying for the Chinese in his job as a physicist at the Los Alamos, New Mexico, nuclear laboratory. Lee was arrested December 10, 1999, after allegations surfaced that he had downloaded classified information at the laboratory. A 59-count federal indictment alleged that Lee failed to safeguard classified information adequately by downloading top secret data into a nonsecure computer, but it did not accuse him of spying for China or any other country. He was ordered to await trial in jail without bail.

While Lee was imprisoned, the government's case came under increasing criticism. Asian-American groups accused the government of prosecuting Lee because of his Asian heritage. The government's credibility also suffered when FBI agent Robert Messier testified that he gave false testimony when Lee was ordered to be held without bail. The case against Lee ended when he pleaded guilty September 13, 2000, to one charge of mishandling classified information in exchange for the government dropping the remaining 58 counts.

•  George Trofimoff, a retired Army Reserve colonel, was accused last year of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for a quarter of a century. He is the highest-ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage. He allegedly photographed U.S. documents and passed the film to KGB agents, and was later recruited into the KGB.

Sources: Associated Press, U.S. Defense Security Services