ESPIONAGE CASES - UNITED STATES

Other Cases - By Name

L

Included here:

1. Duncan Lee

2. Kurt G. Lessenthien

3. Robert S. Lipka

4. Clayton Lonetree

Materials in each listing presented chronologically.

1. Duncan Lee

Legvold, FA 83.3 (May-Jun. 2014), finds that the author "exposes in riveting fashion how the Soviet Spy network worked and how it flummoxed the FBI, which was very slow to catch on." Peake, Studies 58.2 (Jun. 2014), and Intelligencer 20.3 (Spring-Summer 2014), refers to the author's "thorough scholarship" and calls the work "a major contribution to counterintelligence literature."

2. Kurt G. Lessenthien

Counterintelligence News and Developments. "Navy Spy Sentenced." Nov 1996. [http:// www.nacic.gov]

"After he admitted to trying to sell military secrets to Russia, Petty Officer Kurt G. Lessenthien - a nuclear submarine crewmen and instructor at the Navy's Nuclear Power School in Orlando, Florida - was sentenced to 27 years in prison on 28 October 1996."

3. Robert S. Lipka

Counterintelligence News and Developments. "Ex-NSA Employee Sentenced for Cold War Espionage." Dec. 1997. [http://www.nacic.gov]

"Robert S. Lipka, 51, was sentenced to 18 years in prison and fined $10,000 on September 24, 1997 for selling top-secret documents to the Soviet Union three decades ago. He was charged with photographing the papers while working as a US Army clerk at the National Security Agency from 1965 through 1967. During this period he photographed documents with a camera provided by the Soviet agents and dropped off the film in a park for payments of up to $1,000 a drop[,] according to US Government affidavits."

Leppard, David, Jon Ungoed-Thomas, Paul Nuki, Gareth Walsh, and Clive Freeman. "Briton's Treachery Exposed by Keeper of KGB's Secrets: Defector Smuggled Out Copies of the 'Crown Jewels' of Soviet Espionage." Sunday Times (London), 12 Sept. 1999. [http://www. the-times.co.uk]

Vasili Mitrokhin was head archivist of the KGB's First Chief Directorate until he retired in 1985. He regularly removed key files from storage, copied down their contents on pieces of paper, smuggled them past the security guards, took them to his home, and typed up verbatim transcripts of his handwritten notes.

In 1992, "he travelled to Latvia, taking thousands of pages of his documents with him. He walked into the American embassy in Riga and asked if he could defect.... Incredibly, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officers at the embassy were not interested.... The documents he had were clearly not originals and could easily have been fakes....

"Undeterred, Mitrokhin went to the British embassy," where a Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) officer "spotted his potential. After a series of in-depth interviews and consultations with headquarters, Mitrokhin was formally accepted as an MI6 agent.... Within weeks of his defection, MI6 carried out a delicate operation to remove the files [hidden in Mitrokhin's house and garden].... The classified files went back to the 1930s....

"[S]enior intelligence officers say that the files have generated hundreds of new leads and could lead to a spate of new espionage prosecutions.... Some of Mitrokhin's information helped to convict Robert Lipka, a former clerk at the National Security Agency. He had spied for the Russians in the late 1960s but had evaded FBI surveillance until Mitrokhin came in. He is now serving an 18-year sentence.

"Another case that has been reopened is that of Felix Bloch, the highest-ranking State Department official ever investigated for espionage. He was fired in 1989 and stripped of his pension, but the FBI never had enough evidence to charge him."

Macintyre, Ben. "Files Led FBI to Agent at Work in US." Times (London), 13 Sep. 1999. [http://www.the-times.co.uk]

According to former KGB officer Vasili Mitrokhin and Cambridge historian Christopher Andrew, Robert Lipka, a former clerk at the National Security Agency, was captured "through information contained in the 'Mitrokhin files.'" Lipka is "currently serving an 18-year sentence for espionage."

The files "are also believed to contain information ... on the enduring mystery of Felix Bloch.... The State Department alleged he had engaged in 'illegal activities involving agents of a foreign intelligence service', but he was never charged and instead lost his job for lying to the FBI about the incident."

Whiteside, John W., III. Fool's Mate: A True Story of Espionage at the National Security Agency. CreateSpace, 2013.

Peake, Studies 58.3 (Sep. 2014), notes that the former FBI special agent "describes the investigation and sting operation that led to [Robert] Lipka's arrest and conviction 30 years after his offense."

4. Clayton Lonetree

Headley, Lake, and William Hoffmann. The Court Martial of Clayton Lonetree. New York: Henry Holt, 1989. [Chambers]

Kessler, Ronald. Moscow Station: How the KGB Penetrated the American Embassy. New York: Scribner's, 1989. New York: Pocket Books, 1990. [pb]

Surveillant 1.1 notes that Moscow Station is simultaneously the "only [full] treatment of the CIA Station in Moscow, Lonetree and the Embassy bugging" and controversial. Powers, NYRB (13 May 1993) and Intelligence Wars (2004), 295-320, comments that Kessler's picture of "the embassy's pathetic failure to protect its own security" is "thoroughly documented."

According to Evans, IJI&C 3.4, Kessler asserts that the embassy code room was compromised, and charges the CIA and NSA "with covering up the compromise, the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) with mismanaging related cases..., and the Office of Special Investigation (OSI) under the Government Accounting Office with misrepresenting the quality of the NIS performance." The reviewer adds: "If a KGB penetration could not be proven, there could hardly be a cover-up." There is a detailed analysis of the chronology and evidence. Evans concludes that "the existence ... of a ... conspiracy [by NIS] seems outside not only the realm of possibility, but of credibility."

NameBase calls Moscow Station "the story of the KGB's efforts to penetrate the U.S. embassy in Moscow, mainly by planting eavesdropping devices and by assigning attractive Soviet women to bait U.S. personnel.... About half of the book reconstructs the investigation of Clayton J. Lonetree,... a young marine guard, [who] confessed in 1987 after passing secrets to his Soviet girlfriend, who was employed at the embassy, and her KGB control officer, Alexei G. Yefimov."

Sharman, Jackson R., III. "Embassy Spy's Conviction Upheld: Court Denies Lonetree Appeal." National Security Law Report 15, no. 1 (Jan. 1993): 3-4.

United States v. Lonetree, No. 65,642 (NMCM 88 2414) (United States Ct. Mil. App. Sept. 28, 1992).

Barker, Rodney. Dancing with the Devil: Sex, Espionage, and the U.S. Marines -- The Clayton Lonetree Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Surveillant 4.3: "Barker's attempt to paint Lonetree as a victim of racial prejudice..., as merely a scapegoat for the errors of his superiors, and, alas, as a misguided victim of love, do not change the facts." The Periscope 21.5 reviewer suggests that Barker "at least" sets the record "straighter than it was before," but also notes that "much of the material [in the book] is not attributable."

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