Compromise
Ronald William Pelton, a 44-year-old veteran of the NSA, was fluent in Russian and considered to be a highly skilled communications analyst/specialist, but very bad at personal finance. Hostile toward the agency and dissatisfied with his position, Pelton was $65,000 in debt and filed for personal bankruptcy just three months before he resigned. With only a few hundred dollars in the bank, Pelton walked into the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC in January 1980 and offered to sell what he knew to the KGB for money.
No documents were passed from Pelton to the Soviets, as he had an extremely good memory. He reportedly received $35,000 from the KGB for the intelligence he provided from 1980 to 1983, and for the intelligence on the Operation Ivy Bells, the KGB gave him $5,000. The Soviets did not immediately take any action on this information. However, in 1981, surveillance satellites showed Soviet warships, including a salvage vessel, anchored over the site of the tap in the Sea of Okhotsk. USS Parche was dispatched to recover the device, but her divers were unable to find it and it was concluded that the Soviets had taken it. It remains unclear why it took the Soviets so long, although a plausible explanation is that it was used to feed disinformation to U.S. defense intelligence.
In July 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a KGB colonel who was Pelton's initial contact in Washington D.C., defected to the U.S. and provided the information that eventually led to Pelton's arrest.
The recording device captured by the Soviets was later put on public display in a museum in Moscow.
Read more about this topic: Operation Ivy Bells
Famous quotes containing the word compromise:
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)