Ronald Pelton

Ronald William Pelton was an NSA spy who was convicted in 1986 of spying for and selling secrets to the Soviet Union. He reportedly has a photographic memory as he passed no documents to the Soviets. One operation he compromised was Operation Ivy Bells.

Prior to his employment by the NSA Pelton served in the United States Air Force. He was taught the Russian language by the Air Force and served for a time in the early 1960s in Peshawar, Pakistan as a voice intercept processing specialist, which required a Top Secret Crypto security clearance. After that 15 month tour he was transferred to NSA, where he continued as a civilian employee upon discharge. Ron had a serious interest in gambling, often playing cards in the day room for 72 hours at a time while stationed in Peshawar as part of Able Flight.

In 1980, Pelton retired from NSA. From the years of 1980 to 1984 he held a different series of jobs, none of which required him to have a security clearance and thus those jobs had nothing to do with the intelligence community. In 1984, Pelton had faced financial difficulties as a result of increasing homeowners' taxes and a mounting series of necessary repairs on his private residence, to which he felt his employment was insufficient to meet those monetary demands.

While on a vacation in Vienna, Austria, Pelton walked into the Soviet Embassy to Austria, and demanded to see the KGB chief of station, copying the same method which had been done by Soviet spy John Anthony Walker 17 years earlier. As a "walk-in", Pelton orally briefed the KGB on his knowledge of Operation Ivy Bells, an NSA and US Navy program to surreptitiously wiretap undersea cables to monitor Soviet military communications and track Soviet submarines.

Pelton agreed to sell these secrets for an undisclosed amount of cash, and depended on his excellent memory to recreate the project orally.

The subsequent removal of the recording cassettes indicated to the Navy the project had been compromised. Because less than 100 people had knowledge of the project, all were considered suspects. When Pelton was interrogated in 1986, he promptly confessed and was subsequently arrested. It was later believed that if Pelton had not confessed, he may not have been able to have been charged with espionage, as he never passed a single hardcopy document to the Soviets or manually stole data from an intelligence unit, and oral presentations are very hard to provide proof of espionage.

He is currently serving three consecutive life sentences but is scheduled for release in 2015.

External links

* [http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/spies/whois_pelton.html "NSA: Ronald Pelton"] from CBS news