Not Quite Another “Year of the Spy.”
The Grand Jury for the District of Maryland’s indictment of Ronald Pelton for espionage.
Take, for example, the 1986 espionage conviction of former NSA intelligence analyst Ronald Pelton. Declassified documents posted on the Archive’s Digital National Security Archive show that Pelton provided details of five signals intelligence (SIGINT) operations to the Soviets in exchange for $35,000. For that relatively modest chunk of change –Pelton needed to pay growing homeowners’ taxes and repair bills– he debriefed KGB Officer Anatoly Slavnov multiple times between 1980 and 1985. Most notably, the information Pelton passed disrupted Operation Ivy Bells, a joint NSA, Navy, and CIA mission that tapped Soviet deep sea communications cables.
The USS Halibut, the nuclear submarine charged with tapping the Soviet submarine cables, and the tapping device.
Pelton’s meetings with the Soviets took place during the years after his departure from the NSA in 1979. While working for the NSA from 1965 to 1979, Pelton held a Top Secret clearance as well as SIGINT clearances, giving him prime access to information on SIGINT operations like Ivy Bells. Operation Ivy Bells attached listening devices (see photo at right) to the underwater cables that carried data communications between Soviet military bases. If the Soviets attempted to repair or investigate the underwater cables for any reason, the listening devices were designed to fall off and sink undetected to the ocean floor. The Operation continued until 1981, when the Soviets, aided by Pelton, discovered the listening device and the Operation was abandoned.
It’s worth noting that during Operation Ivy Bells the NSA was spying on Soviet telecommunications cables. By 1988 the first fiber-optic cables, which transmit digital data, were beginning to be used, and Edward Snowden’s recent revelations show that the NSA is still spying on these kinds of cables. Though now it’s not Soviet communications the NSA collecting, its everyone’s.
Pelton’s arrest was just one of the events that marked 1985 as the “Year of the Spy” after a series of arrests and one defection revealed deep compromises of US secrets. Two days before Pelton’s November arrest, the FBI accused long-time CIA employee Larry Wu-Tai Chin of spying for the Chinese, just one day after Jonathan Pollard, an analyst for the Navy’s Anti-Terrorist Alert Center, was arrested for spying for Israel. Prior to the trio of November arrests, former Navy employee John A. Walker, Jr. was taken into custody for providing documents to the KGB, and former CIA employee Edward Lee Howard defected to the Soviets.
Fears of espionage were deservedly high in the 1980s, as shown in the cover of Chapter 3 of the Third Volume of A Counterintelligence Reader, “1980s, Decade of the Spy.“
As the list of people charged with violating the 1917 Espionage Act by the Obama Administration grows, (more than all other administrations in history… combined), it might seem like another “Year of the Spy” is upon us. But this isn’t true. The charges levied in 1985 and throughout the 1980s were brought against people who actively sold US secrets “for” another country’s benefit, while Edward Snowden (NSA Surveillance), Pfc. Bradley Manning (WikiLeaks), Thomas Drake (former NSA employee who leaked classified information on surveillance programs), Stephen Kim (former State Department contractor charged with revealing information on North Korea to a reporter), Jeffrey Sterling (former CIA officer who communicated information on Iran’s nuclear program to a reporter), James Hitselberger (a Navy linguist who provided classified information to the Hoover Institution), and John Kiriakou (former CIA employee who provided information on torture programs) all cooperated with journalists to expose what they believed was government wrongdoing. Hopefully the trend of accusing whistleblowers of being spies will be reversed and action will be taken to correct misuse of government power before our national security–including our liberty– is truly irrevocably harmed.
*There was one case from 1985, “Year of the Spy,” brought against a government employee for providing classified information to the media. Samuel Loring Morison, a former Navy analyst, was convicted of theft of government property for illegally providing satellite imagery to Jane’s Defense Weekly, a British military publication.
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My advice: Don’t hold your breath the persecutions of honest leakers will be over anytime soon.
In the United States theory of law there is a known and in the past prosecuted concept called ‘color of law.’ Color of law is when the apparatus of state puts up a pretense of legitimate authority to pursue what are in fact illegal acts.
In the case of the FISA court, there is ZERO constitutional foundation for any secret jurisprudence violating American citizens’ individual rights laid out in our constitution’s first through eighth amendments, which the FISA court authorizing Prism in fact sets out to do.
The actual traitors under any authentic American or ‘de jure’ rule of law are those persons putting forth a pretense these civil liberties violations are legitimate. This points first to the Congress authoring patently unconstitutional legislation, then second, to any president signing and implementing such unlawful authority and subsequently, any Chief Justice appointing members of said secret court under FISA law, and finally those persons accepting and serving FISA, these are the ‘traitors’ if our constitution were to mean anything in the present day, which in fact it would appear it does not.
It is clear our core American values in philosophy, theory and practice of law, have been discarded by the national leadership of both parties.
When Senator Diane Feinstein claims ‘prism’ is ‘legal’ she is in a philosophy of law tar pit. Prism is unconstitutional from top to bottom, our constitution’s clause authorizing congress to create courts does not employ language allowing a constitutional oxymoron, that is creating secret jurisdiction undermining other clauses of the constitution or one clause empowered to undermine the other clauses.
Restated in the simplest terms; When the clause allowing congress to create courts is construed in such a way as to undermine other constitutional clauses, only one clause will count: the clause congress gave away to secrecy. You can forget about the rest, including the clauses which guarantee a trial by your peers, the right to confront your accusers, your right to freely associate, your right to peaceably assemble, your right of public speech, all of which you can now be prosecuted in secret, and now your private speech can be stolen and misconstrued in secret star chamber proceedings, et cetera, add nausea. The end result is no constitution at all