HC_Deep Undercover_1of8_Traitors Within
Transcript
00:00The intelligence community, in assessing damage, spied on the Soviet KGB and received a million
00:06dollars.
00:12Spying has been called the second oldest profession in the world.
00:161985 would become known as the year of the spy, when four Americans committed treason.
00:24Every time you caught one, it was worse than the one before.
00:28More astounding was the fact that they worked for four different intelligence agencies.
00:33Each of these agencies never believed their own people would turn against them.
00:38The breadth of the penetration and the damage done to naval and military operations, the
00:44loss of top secret codes, and the execution of our own spies in Russia were catastrophic.
00:52Collectively, the damage is absolutely obscene, and could have been disastrous at any time
00:59that we were going to war.
01:05In the early 80s, the Cold War had reached a critical stage.
01:11Tensions had ratcheted up between the Soviet Union and the United States.
01:17Reagan called for a moral crusade against the Soviets, calling them the Evil Empire.
01:25To protect against the threat of nuclear war, Reagan proposed a missile defense system that
01:30became known as Star Wars.
01:34I think this led to a great deal of the tension that existed between the Soviet Union and
01:39the United States at that time, and it certainly led, as we now know, to a war scare in Moscow
01:44about what Reagan's intentions actually were.
01:48The Soviet leadership was truly scared by President Reagan's new policies.
01:55They considered these policies as aggressive, militaristic, and fought with danger of real war.
02:06As fear and distrust escalated on both sides, the invisible war of spy versus spy intensified.
02:15The Soviets were determined to learn America's secrets.
02:19Now, they admit, they weren't having much luck recruiting American spies.
02:24But as luck would have it, they wouldn't need any.
02:28Americans with access to top-secret and classified information were offering to spy for the Soviets
02:34for a price.
02:36They were walking in off the streets, offering themselves, providing classified information
02:42up front, and receiving money in return and the promise of more money.
02:48These spies weren't motivated by a fervent belief in communism, like the spies of the
02:5340s and 50s, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Rudolph Abel.
02:57These spies were motivated by the oldest temptations in the book, money and sex, and sometimes, revenge.
03:07The first spy to be revealed in 1985 was Richard Miller, an FBI agent.
03:13It was the first time in history that the FBI had arrested one of their own for espionage.
03:19Before Richard Miller came along, the idea that an agent of the FBI could be disloyal
03:27to his country was inconceivable.
03:30Now it isn't.
03:31Miller, a 20-year veteran of the FBI, was a far cry from James Bond or television's
03:37version of an FBI agent, as even his lawyer admitted.
03:41He was certainly no Ephraim Zimbalist Jr., and he was, in fact, much closer to an overweight
03:47Inspector Clouseau.
03:48Miller had been chastised by the agency for being obese and for selling Amway products
03:54out of the trunk of his car.
03:56He was viewed as a loser by most of his fellow agents.
04:00At age 47, Miller's private life was in shambles.
04:04In 1983, he had been excommunicated from the Mormon Church for committing adultery and
04:10was separated from his wife and eight children.
04:13I wasn't successful in my religion, I wasn't successful in my marriage, although I consider
04:18myself a good father, and I wasn't very successful at work.
04:22So come May of 1984, I'm sort of like a glob of silly putty waiting to be molded into
04:30whatever fashion anybody wants me to.
04:33In 1984, Miller's FBI job in counterintelligence included keeping tabs on Russian emigres in
04:40the Los Angeles area.
04:42He'd been given a job that was supposed to be least likely to get him into trouble, and
04:48that's where he met a woman who persuaded him to do the things that he did.
04:55In the course of doing his job, Miller met Svetlana Ogorodnikova, a striking Russian
05:01emigre who lived in L.A. with her husband and young son.
05:05She claimed to be a distributor of Soviet films, but the FBI learned she had close ties
05:11to KGB agents.
05:14Soon, their friendly chats over coffee turned into long afternoons at the beach in Malibu
05:20and trysts at Svetlana's apartment in Hollywood while her husband was at work.
05:25He'd been compromised by a Soviet matahari.
05:30After a few weeks, her hello talk turned to persuasion as she convinced Miller to trade
05:35classified secrets to the Russians for money.
05:40Svetlana contacted the Russian consulate in San Francisco and set up a meeting.
05:45Miller brought along an FBI foreign intelligence manual offering to sell it for $15,000 in
05:52cash and $50,000 in gold.
05:56The Soviets were interested and proposed a second meeting with the KGB in Vienna, Austria.
06:04Okay, they're both in her car and they're driving away.
06:07But the FBI had been tipped off by an informant about the couple's visit to the Russian consulate.
06:13I can't really detail how he was found.
06:16I think some of that's still classified, but his credentials showed up on some documents
06:21we were able to obtain by sensitive means, and it didn't take long.
06:31You're taking my heart, right?
06:34The FBI began surveillance on each of them and tapped Svetlana's phone.
06:44On October 3rd, before their imminent trip to Vienna, Miller and Svetlana were arrested.
06:54When questioned by the FBI, this rather pathetic, wannabe spy broke down.
07:00Miller defended himself, claiming he was trying to demonstrate his value to the FBI by setting
07:06himself up as a double agent to spy on the Russians.
07:10It was a last-ditch effort to save his career.
07:13My overriding emphasis was, hey, Richard, you're in trouble with your job.
07:20This is your last chance to save your career and so forth.
07:23So I pulled all the stops, and nothing would deter me from my objective of trying to get myself
07:29back into good graces, because I only had a couple of years before I would have retired.
07:34The jury didn't buy Miller's story and found him guilty.
07:38Richard Miller was sentenced to two life terms plus 50 years.
07:42The sentence, on appeal, was reduced to 20 years in prison.
07:47Svetlana received 18 years and continued to deny she was a modern-day Matahari.
07:54I'm not guilty of this crime.
07:58Like I say, they accused Matahari before, 100 years ago.
08:04Now they say she's not guilty.
08:06She's helped a friend.
08:10I'm not guilty of this crime.
08:14After Miller's arrest, many wondered why he hadn't been fired by the FBI years ago.
08:20A lot of people, early on, didn't want to look at it hard and long
08:26and with the kind of critical eye that is necessary in order to clean it up.
08:31I don't regard the Miller case as being a particularly damaging case for the country,
08:40but it was a real jolt to the FBI to think that one of their own would behave in that way.
08:46The intelligence community seemed to view this as an isolated case,
08:51but the next spy arrested in 1985 would prove how disastrous a mistake that could be.
08:59Since World War II, the United States has had the largest and most powerful Navy in the world, or so we thought.
09:08But in 1985, when former Navy man John Walker and his ring of spies were arrested,
09:15the government was astonished to discover that the naval fleet had been systematically sabotaged for 18 years.
09:23The most damaging thing they really did was to provide the Russians with real hard data on how good our submarines were
09:32and enabled, for a long period, the Soviets to know exactly where all of our submarines were at any given time.
09:42If war had broken out, thousands and thousands of people would have died.
09:50Thousands and thousands of American kids would have died as a result of that.
09:56John Walker, Jr. began his espionage career in 1967 when he was a Navy radio man in Norfolk, Virginia,
10:04at the largest Navy base in the world.
10:07In his job, he had access to coded messages between the fleet's ships and submarines and the Navy command center.
10:15Most damaging, he had access to key lists used to decipher the Navy's top-secret encryption codes.
10:23Thirty-year-old Walker was in debt. He needed money and knew how to get it quickly, selling secrets to the Soviets.
10:33The motivation was not complex. It was pure greed.
10:39In late 1967, he traveled to Washington, D.C., walked into the Soviet Embassy, and offered his services as a spy.
10:48John Walker was a walk-in. He was one of those volunteers who came to the Russian Embassy, Soviet Embassy, in my time.
10:58In 1967, Oleg Kalugin was then the KGB officer stationed at the Soviet Embassy in Washington.
11:06He would supervise Walker's meetings with his KGB handlers.
11:11Had the military conflict erupted between the two superpowers at the time,
11:16the compromised cryptographic material provided by John Walker would have had war-winning implications for the Soviet side.
11:25Eventually, Walker provided the Soviets with the keys to the kingdom,
11:29compromising U.S. naval forces, including the strategic superiority of nuclear submarines, an incredible coup for the Soviets.
11:39Walker gave the Soviets daily code settings for the KL-47 encryption machine that encoded and decoded top-secret messages for the American fleet.
11:50Using the key lists provided by Walker, they could decipher the most highly classified communications of the U.S. Navy.
11:58Even if we intercept the orders coming from Washington, even before the United States launches,
12:05we have an opportunity to make a preemptive strike, which would make America indeed in a very bad situation.
12:17During that same time, the United States was waging a fierce war in Vietnam.
12:23The classified information Walker gave to the Soviets enabled them to pass along U.S. naval communications to the North Vietnamese.
12:31They provided to the North Vietnamese the secret daily codes for our aviators as to where they would be going,
12:41which targets would get hit, what the rules of engagement were,
12:45so that it enabled the North Vietnamese to emplace their anti-aircraft weapons and to set up traps for the American aircraft.
12:54And as a result, a lot of airmen died because of that during the Vietnam War.
13:02In 1976, after spying for nine years, Walker retired from the Navy with the rank of Warrant Officer III,
13:10not the most prestigious rank in the Navy, but he knew the Soviets ranked him number one as a spy.
13:17He started his own private investigation firm in Virginia Beach, but Walker wanted to keep his lucrative spy business going.
13:25So he enlisted the help of his brother, Arthur, and his friend, Jerry Whitworth, both Navy men with access to classified information.
13:36The same year, he divorced his wife, Barbara, who moved to Massachusetts with their three daughters.
13:42His son, Michael, chose to live with the father he idolized.
13:46I had a closer relationship with my father. I was more like him. I wanted to be like him.
13:53John Walker, flush with money, was leading the high life.
13:57He bought a plane and houseboat, partied heavily, and had lots of women.
14:02I liked the way he dressed. I liked his cars. I liked his boats, his house, his women.
14:07Well, we were more than just father and son. We were very good friends.
14:14Walker was setting the stage for Michael to take over the lucrative spy business when he retired.
14:20I was burning out at that point and looking to get out of it completely, just retire and quit.
14:31He talked Michael into enlisting in the Navy and specializing in communications.
14:37Eventually, Michael was assigned to the USS Nimitz as a radio man, which fell right into his father's plans.
14:45Joined the Navy like he had done. Did all the things in the Navy he had done, basically.
14:50And there was a pattern. Everything was pointing in that direction. There was no avoiding it.
14:56At a certain point, it was to the point of no return.
14:59Amazingly, on board the Nimitz, Michael, without having security clearance,
15:04had no trouble getting access to and stealing hundreds of classified documents,
15:09which he dutifully handed over to his father.
15:12Michael hid the documents under his pillow and simply walked off the Nimitz with them in his duffel bag.
15:18He was never searched.
15:20Incredibly, Walker and his spy ring went undetected for 18 years, from 1967 to 1985.
15:28The Soviets had paid him close to $2 million. He was considered their number one spy.
15:35What a wonderful thing for a person who's having a rather mediocre career
15:42to be looking in the mirror each morning and saying,
15:46Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the most famous, the most dramatic, the most heroic spy of them all?
15:55And to know that while your bosses think you're a mediocrity,
16:00you know you're the most important spy that the Soviets have ever recruited.
16:06What finally brought Walker down?
16:10It wasn't naval intelligence. The Navy never suspected spies in their midst.
16:17The tip that led to Walker's arrest came from a much closer source.
16:22Walker's ex-wife.
16:25She had known about Walker's espionage and even accompanied him on some of his dead drops to the Soviets.
16:32I prayed he would be caught. I also prayed that he would stop.
16:36I knew there was nothing I could say that would stop him.
16:39Barbara never knew that her son, Michael, was spying for her ex-husband.
16:44I couldn't tell her because I was afraid it would hurt her
16:48and that maybe she might try something like killing herself, my father,
16:54or just going off the deep end. I was really afraid for that.
16:57In November of 1984, Barbara's daughter, Laura, told her mother that when she was in the Army,
17:03her father had tried to enlist her as a spy.
17:06Outraged, Barbara finally worked up the courage to call the FBI.
17:11But they had a hard time believing her story.
17:14Barbara told this fantastic story.
17:18But one FBI agent, Joe Wolfinger, in Norfolk, Virginia, did believe her.
17:24Apparently Barbara Walker had accompanied him to Washington to fill a drop, clear a drop.
17:31She described that in a way in which I did not think a disgruntled, vindictive former wife
17:39would be able to describe an espionage transaction.
17:44She talked about seeing signals, leaving a drop at a particular place.
17:50It really had too much rich detail to be completely disregarded.
17:55So on those facts, we opened a case.
17:59Wolfinger had no idea that the investigation would reveal a spy
18:04who many still believe to be the most damaging in American history.
18:12On February 25, 1985, the FBI officially opened the case on John Walker.
18:19But to convict him, they would have to catch him in the act of making a drop to the Soviets.
18:26At this point, the FBI had never caught a spy in the act.
18:31The FBI tapped his phones at his home in Norfolk, Virginia, and his private investigation firm.
18:38They hoped for a clue, a hint of an upcoming delivery to the Soviets.
18:44In the meantime, they learned a bit about his personality from listening to his phone calls.
18:50He would lie when the truth would serve him better.
18:54He was totally self-centered.
18:57The FBI tapped Walker's phones for a month, and finally, it paid off on May 16, 1985.
19:04They overheard a telephone call that sounded suspicious.
19:08And it was his mother telling him that his favorite aunt had, as she said,
19:15cashed in her chips, meaning, of course, that she had died.
19:19And John's mom wanted him to come up to Pennsylvania and attend the funeral.
19:24And he begged off and said that he just couldn't come.
19:28He had something to do that no one else could do.
19:31Well, as an investigator, that raises my antenna.
19:37That weekend, Joe Wolfinger and FBI investigator Bob Hunter
19:42ordered surveillance teams and a helicopter to cover Walker's comings and goings.
19:49That Sunday, Walker came out, packed his van with a duffel bag, and backed out of his driveway.
19:57The FBI hoped this was the real thing and not a wild goose chase.
20:05So now we're heading to D.C.
20:08It's getting very exciting at this point.
20:12As they reached the state line, Wolfinger and Hunter turned it over to another FBI team
20:17while they went to the FBI headquarters in D.C. to monitor the chase.
20:23Wolfinger and I were in the command center about 20 minutes, I guess,
20:28when the words that you never want to hear on surveillance came piping through the radio,
20:33anybody have the eyeball, we've lost them.
20:37So we agonized there in that command center for four hours.
20:42We didn't know where John was.
20:44Finally, they picked up sight of Walker's Chevy Astrovan again at 7.45 p.m.
20:51Everything was wonderful. It was a wonderful day once again.
20:55And the spirits were high, and we were hard on the task immediately.
21:02They followed Walker to an intersection in the backcountry roads of Maryland.
21:07The Soviets had prepared obsessively detailed maps for Walker
21:11as well as photos of the signal and drop sites.
21:16Walker got out of his car at a stop sign and placed a 7-up can under it and left.
21:24It was a signal to his KGB contact that he would make a drop later that night.
21:31Walker drove off, and the FBI continued its tight surveillance.
21:42At about 8.30, he stopped under a tree, got out of his van,
21:48put something down on the ground, and we could see that.
21:52After Walker left the scene, the FBI rushed in.
21:56Agents found a brown paper bag filled with bottles and junk,
22:01but buried under the garbage were reams of classified documents.
22:05One of the agents came on the radio, and there was some excitement,
22:08and he said, I've got it, I've got it, I can see it.
22:11It's got secret stuff in it.
22:13And at that point, we had an almost perfect espionage case against John Walker.
22:19When the agents searched the bag, they found 129 classified documents
22:24from the USS Nimitz, where Michael Walker was assigned.
22:28They had the evidence. Now they needed the spy.
22:33They followed Walker back to the Ramada Inn in Rockville, Maryland, room 763.
22:39He was signed in under an assumed name, John A. Johnson.
22:44At 3.30 a.m., an FBI agent, posing as a desk clerk, called Walker in his room.
22:51Mr. Johnson, you drive in a Chevy Astrovan, license so-and-so.
22:56Would you mind coming down to the desk?
22:59Someone just ran into it, and we need to talk to the police, get the insurance, whatever.
23:07And, of course, when he comes out, we're going to effect the arrest.
23:12Bob Hunter and his partner were ready to nab him as he reached the elevator.
23:17We knew that we had probably the biggest spy that there has ever been in this country.
23:25So the adrenaline is really flowing, and the heart is going, and we are ready.
23:31Finally, they heard Walker's door open and close and saw him approach the elevator.
23:39As he reaches for the elevator button with his left hand,
23:46he heard us move, and he wheeled around with his gun on us.
23:52We were close enough that I could see the bullets in the cylinder of his revolver.
23:58You know how you hear things are slow motion in some situations?
24:02Well, that's what this was.
24:04And I'm watching him with this pistol in his hand, and I could see those bullets.
24:12And it seemed like a long time before he finally did what we told him to,
24:17which, of course, was to drop the gun.
24:20John Walker's days as the perfect spy were over,
24:23and he would suffer another humiliation as well.
24:27As Kaluch is searching him, he reached up and grabbed that toupee
24:32and pulled it off John's head, and it made this loud sucking noise,
24:37and he threw it on the floor, and I sort of laughed to myself.
24:40That was funny. In this period of high drama, that was funny.
24:45In 1985, John Walker, Jr. was sentenced to life imprisonment,
24:50as was his brother, Arthur, and his pal, Jerry Whitworth.
24:55His son, Michael, received 25 years.
24:58Evidence at trial and evidence before the grand jury,
25:01testimony by distinguished intelligence and military experts,
25:09they said that Walker's espionage gave the Russians war-winning capability.
25:18Throughout his arrest and trial, Walker showed no remorse,
25:22excusing his actions by saying the Russians never could have won the war.
25:27I sold secrets to a country that we were not at war with
25:31and never have been at war with and never will be at war with.
25:35That's all I'm saying. Don't make more of it than it is.
25:39But the Soviets had given Walker's secret codes to the North Vietnamese,
25:44who were at war with the U.S.
25:46I've always thought that John Walker is responsible for many of the widows
25:51that I knew in Virginia Beach who lost their husbands in Vietnam who were Navy pilots.
25:58He did some devastating things to this country.
26:01He put his comrades at risk and caused some of them to die.
26:08He has to live with that, but I don't have to like him.
26:13Walker's arrest was a major victory for the FBI, but the year wasn't over yet.
26:19Two more spies would be arrested in 1985,
26:23but they would be caught through information received from a surprising source,
26:28a Russian spymaster who was a colonel in the KGB.
26:35Aftershocks were still being felt following John Walker's arrest
26:39when another bombshell hit the intelligence community in the fall of 1985.
26:45It would come from a very reliable but surprising source,
26:49a senior officer in the KGB, Vitaly Yurchenko.
26:54On August 1, 1985, Yurchenko visited Rome, contacted the American embassy,
27:00and asked for asylum.
27:02He claimed to want freedom and a better quality of life,
27:06but what he didn't mention was that he also hoped to reignite a love affair
27:10with the wife of the Russian ambassador now in Canada.
27:14The next day, he was flown to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, D.C.
27:20It was a very festive atmosphere there.
27:24We certainly were looking forward to getting a lot of information from Yurchenko.
27:30The FBI and CIA started debriefing Yurchenko immediately at a safe house in Virginia.
27:37The first question is always, do you know of any imminence of war?
27:41And then the second one usually is, and always is,
27:45is there somebody that we should watch out for,
27:48that you want to tell just the director of central intelligence?
27:52And the implication, everybody knows it, I think, is that is there a spy in the government?
27:57Yurchenko would astonish them when he told them not one, but two.
28:01He didn't know their names, but he described them and said one worked for the CIA.
28:07Yurchenko said his name is Robert, which was his codename,
28:11and he's being trained to go to Moscow.
28:14Well, the CIA knew right away that it had to be Edward Lee Howard.
28:17Edward Lee Howard had been one of the bright young Turks at the CIA.
28:22Before joining the agency in the 1970s, he had been with the Peace Corps in Colombia.
28:28In 1981, at 30, he applied for a job with the CIA.
28:33Only two years later, in 1983, he was chosen for a select post in Moscow.
28:39His job would be to recruit Russians to spy for the United States.
28:43He is selected from all the officers trained at the farm to be in Moscow.
28:49This is top gun for the agency.
28:52As part of his training, the CIA gave him detailed background information
28:56on the Russians spying for the United States.
28:59But at the 11th hour in April of 1983, only weeks before his departure to Moscow,
29:05he still had to take one more polygraph test.
29:08The CIA has great confidence in polygraphs.
29:12It's almost a religious belief in the CIA.
29:16He had already admitted to the CIA that in his 20s he had taken drugs,
29:20including cocaine, and had done some heavy drinking.
29:24But this last polygraph showed deception on his part,
29:28a deception the CIA has never revealed.
29:32The CIA asked for his resignation.
29:35Howard was devastated.
29:37He's married, and he has a son just born.
29:42They're getting ready to go, and suddenly the rug is pulled out from under him.
29:47His whole world collapses.
29:51After leaving the CIA, Howard moved his family to Santa Fe, New Mexico,
29:55and tried to pull his life together.
29:59He got a job with the state's finance committee as an economic analyst.
30:03Ed was a very hard worker.
30:05He was a very capable analyst.
30:08He was highly thought of by not only the members of the legislative finance committee,
30:12but other legislators also.
30:14But underneath his pleasant demeanor, there was still a raging anger toward the CIA.
30:19And in Howard's mind, the way to get revenge was to give away what the agency valued most,
30:26intelligence.
30:29He definitely had a problem with alcohol,
30:32and I think it was probably one night while he had a snootful,
30:38he contacted the Soviet consulate here in Washington and said,
30:42you know, I'm a CIA officer.
30:44I have secrets.
30:45I know what we do in Moscow, and I'm available.
30:49You know, have secrets.
30:50We'll travel.
30:53In September 1984, on the pretext of going on a business trip,
30:57Howard went to Vienna, the international capital of spies.
31:02There he met for the first time with his Soviet contact.
31:06Howard gave him names of some Soviets working for the CIA,
31:10information he got while training for his aborted Moscow job.
31:15Any information that he was given by CIA headquarters,
31:20he passed on to the Soviets,
31:23and the Soviets are quite good at analyzing the activities of the intelligence officers who are there.
31:31But Howard's greatest damage was revealing to the KGB the identity of a Russian scientist,
31:37Adolf Tokachev.
31:39Adolf Tokachev was involved in the stealth technology research for the Soviets,
31:44aircraft design, defense research.
31:48Tokachev was immediately arrested by the KGB and executed.
31:52The CIA had no idea Howard was responsible for Tokachev's arrest
31:57until Yurchenko defected and described the traitor in their midst.
32:02Because he had been such a loose cannon after his dismissal,
32:06the CIA was certain that Edward Lee Howard was the spy Yurchenko described.
32:11But still, they waited valuable days before informing the FBI.
32:16If he had gone into the embassy, if we had seen him,
32:24there would have been action that we could have taken at that time.
32:29So why they did not tell us, I don't know.
32:35The CIA knew they should have shared their concerns about Howard sooner,
32:40but there was a longstanding animosity and distrust between these two agencies.
32:45They never get along.
32:47They are like kids in a sandbox kicking sand in each other's faces.
32:53And then when mommy or daddy comes along, they pretend they're playing nice.
32:59Five days after Yurchenko's debriefing,
33:02the CIA finally shared its suspicions with the FBI
33:05who immediately put surveillance on Howard's home.
33:09But Howard had been well trained by the CIA
33:12and quickly picked up that he was being tailed.
33:15He probably picked up their surveillance
33:18within two or three days of it being instituted.
33:24Parker decided to confront Howard directly.
33:27He telephoned him to come to the Hilton Hotel to answer some questions.
33:32He declined to answer any of the questions that were put to him
33:41and denied any involvement whatsoever with any other foreign intelligence service.
33:48That Friday, Howard went home to plot his escape.
33:54Even though Howard's wife Mary later claimed she hadn't known of her husband spying,
33:58she helped him escape.
34:00Together, they jerry-rigged a dummy made with a broom, wig, and old clothes.
34:08Placing it on the floor of the front passenger seat, they drove off to dinner.
34:16The plan?
34:18After dinner, driving back in the dark, Mary made a sharp turn.
34:25Howard rolled out of the car,
34:30and Mary put the dummy in his place.
34:35And when Mary returned home,
34:37FBI agents monitoring their comings and goings on video saw two silhouettes enter the garage.
34:45It worked like a charm.
34:48I do think if the FBI had been told the truth by the CIA in the early 1980s,
34:53Howard could have been stopped.
34:55But the CIA didn't want to tell the FBI how they had botched the recruitment of Howard,
35:00the training of Howard.
35:02Howard made his way to Latin America, then Europe, and finally, Moscow,
35:08where the KGB welcomed him with open arms in late June of 1986.
35:15Shortly after, he appeared on Soviet television to tell his side of the story.
35:22I was emotionally exhausted.
35:24It was a humiliating procedure for me, because my own dignity was at stake.
35:32Howard has lived in Russia since 1986.
35:36His wife Mary didn't join him, and they were divorced in 2000.
35:41Howard married a Czech woman and lives in a dacha provided by the Russians
35:45with a housekeeper and gardener.
35:48A man who betrays his country and gives away secrets,
35:53and he virtually closed down the Moscow station of the CIA,
35:57it becomes hard to argue that he really had no quarrel with his country.
36:01But that's how he feels, that somehow his fight was with the agency and not with America.
36:07And in one of history's strange ironies, Howard lives in the same country
36:12as the man who helped identify him to the CIA and FBI, Vitaly Yurchenko.
36:19Only three months after defecting to the United States,
36:22Yurchenko did an about-face and returned to Russia.
36:26He claimed he had been drugged and kidnapped by American agents.
36:31The KGB welcomed him back as a great PR coup,
36:34even though the KGB knew the real reason for Yurchenko's return.
36:38He hadn't been able to rekindle his love affair
36:41with the wife of the Soviet ambassador in Canada.
36:46But before Yurchenko returned to Russia,
36:49he had told his FBI and CIA debriefers about yet another spy
36:53within the U.S. intelligence community,
36:56a spy who had access to highly classified information
36:59from the most secretive agency of all, the National Security Agency.
37:06Before Vitaly Yurchenko, the ping-pong defector, returned to Russia in 1985,
37:12he gave the FBI clues to a second spy.
37:16This spy was compromising intelligence operations of the National Security Agency.
37:23The NSA is the government's largest intelligence-gathering agency
37:28and so secretive that for years the government didn't even admit it existed.
37:33Insiders would say NSA stood for No Such Agency.
37:38The U.S. government gets actually very little intelligence from human spies from the CIA.
37:45Most of it comes from electronic eavesdropping, code-breaking,
37:49and other activities done by the National Security Agency.
37:52Yurchenko said the Americans selling NSA secrets to the Soviets had the code name Mr. Long.
38:00He had met him once but did not know his real name.
38:04Hello, sir. Yes.
38:07The FBI went into its archives.
38:09I am with the United States government.
38:12And found a wiretap of the Soviet embassy in 1980
38:15with the voice of an American requesting a meeting.
38:18I have some information to discuss with you and to give to you.
38:21What? I think it would be better not to discuss it on the phone.
38:27NSA personnel quickly identified the voice as that of a former employee, Ronald Pelton.
38:34I can be there in two minutes.
38:36Okay.
38:38He had a very sensitive job.
38:40He knew where a lot of the NSA's most sensitive eavesdropping activities were taking place in Russia.
38:46Pelton had worked for the NSA for 14 years.
38:50Two months earlier he had declared bankruptcy and quit the agency.
38:55At 38, $64,000 in debt and struggling to support his wife and four children on his $24,500 a year salary,
39:04he thought he could earn more in the private sector.
39:07He found a job selling yachts.
39:10But in his new job, he was actually making less than he had at the NSA.
39:15On January 14, 1980, still desperate for cash, he placed a call to the Soviet embassy.
39:22What Pelton gave away was one of NSA's biggest secrets.
39:25It was a code named Ivy Bells involving tapping an undersea cable in the Sea of Okhotsk.
39:32The underwater cable connected important Russian military bases and missile testing ranges.
39:38Ivy Bells gave the U.S. an inside track on Soviet military strategy.
39:44They had a submarine go to the very bottom of the sea,
39:48and then they had divers go out of the submarine holding what looked like jumper cables, basically,
39:54and they attached these cables to the Soviet undersea communications cable
39:59using tape recorders on board the submarine, eavesdropping on those communications.
40:04It was one of the most far-ranging and successful operations in NSA's history.
40:11Pelton had blown this $1 billion reconnaissance operation out of the water.
40:17For five years, from 1980 to 1985, Pelton revealed secret operations to the Russians.
40:24When the NSA positively identified him, the FBI put him on 24-hour surveillance and installed wiretaps.
40:32They overheard he was planning a trip to Vienna.
40:36Fearing he might defect, like Edward Lee Howard, they called Pelton up on another pretext, asking for his help.
40:43I told him that we were FBI agents and this was a national security matter,
40:48and we needed his assistance in clearing up some questions.
40:52They told Pelton to meet them at the Annapolis Hilton, where they had set up a room for the interrogation.
40:58As soon as he arrived, they started to grill him.
41:02After a day and night of hard questioning, Pelton finally broke and confessed.
41:09He said that when you're broken and your family's without any money and desperate, you do desperate things.
41:18Unlike John Walker, during Pelton's five years of spying, he received only $37,000 from the Soviets.
41:27But he would end up getting an even harsher sentence than Walker, three life terms plus ten years.
41:36Much of Pelton's damage to national security was classified and never talked about publicly,
41:42but the severe sentence he received reveals the depth and scope of the secrets he told.
41:491985, an astonishing year in the annals of espionage.
41:55Four moles within four different agencies, the FBI, the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and the NSA,
42:04willing to betray their country for money, sex, and revenge.
42:09The good news was that they had finally been caught and brought to justice.
42:14The bad news was the damage they caused and the lives lost because of what they did.
42:20And 1985 was the very same year that two of America's most infamous traitors, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hansen,
42:28were just beginning to spy for the Soviet Union.