NSA Defectors: Snowden Wasn’t the First—Two Laurel Men Were

(Photo: Department of Defense)

“No other event … is likely to have … a greater impact on the Agency’s security program.” — NSA study (1963)

In 2013, when Edward Snowden leaked thousands of documents detailing the inner workings of the National Security Agency (NSA), the reaction and outrage from the government was later summed up by former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, who said, “We had a cyber Pearl Harbor. His name was Edward Snowden.” Snowden initially fled to Hong Kong and then relocated to Russia, where he was granted asylum and where he remains to this day.

But in the extensive media coverage of Snowden, it was rarely mentioned that he was not the first to defect with classified NSA material to Russia. The first were two men from Laurel in 1960. In the years since, many of the files (including NSA documents) about the two men have been declassified and are part of the National Archives holdings in both the Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy papers. Much of the following story is taken from those files.

Pals Since the Navy

Bernon F. Mitchell (31 years old in 1960) and William H. Martin (29) were mathematicians engaged in statistical research and cryptology at NSA at Fort Meade, as GS-11 civilian employees. They were hired together in 1957. They had been friends since the early 1950s, when both were in the Navy, stationed in Japan doing cryptologic work for the Navy and Army at Yokosuka Naval Base. Neither was married.

When they were hired by NSA, they both took up residence in Laurel. Mitchell rented a house on Eighth Street in Laurel Hills, and Martin lived in a local motel.

Both passed NSA’s security background checks, but not without some concerns. According to the NSA archival documents, the younger Martin’s “background investigation had revealed such comments as the following: insufferable egotist … effeminate … not wholly normal … rather irresponsible … might be swayed by flattery … former supervisors in Army and Navy were almost unanimous in not wanting him to work for them again, but with only one exception they saw no reason why he couldn’t have access to classified information.”

Mitchell’s investigation was even more suspect. “A check of lie-detector results at time of employment revealed that Mitchell had some sexual aberration prior to age 20. Investigation then showed he had been having psychiatric treatment recently for highly emotional disturbance. Martin’s mother, in Ellensburg, Washington, in her talks to the NSA Security officer, described her son as a genius, far superior to ordinary men.”

Author James Bamford reported in his book The Puzzle Palace that, during Mitchell’s polygraph interview, “He showed little reaction until the questions began turning to sexual perversion and blackmail. … Mitchell gave in and told his interrogator about certain ‘sexual experimentations’ with dogs and chickens he had done when he was between the ages of 13 and 19.”

Even though both were hired, their background investigations became fodder for the government and the media after they defected.

Disillusioned

According to the NSA documents, “both had access to compartmented, classified projects at NSA dealing with Soviet [redacted]. Martin’ s knowledge is on [redacted]. He brought himself up-to-date on the project when he returned to NSA for the summer from the University of Illinois. Mitchell has knowledge of a [redacted] project.”

But after just two years at the agency, the two friends became disillusioned by what they perceived to be illegal or immoral activities. In their book The Sword and the Shield, authors Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (a former KGB agent who defected to the U.S.) labeled Martin and Mitchell “politically naïve and socially inadequate.”

An incident in late 1958 seemed to be the pivotal event that led to their defecting. As described by Bamford, NSA required ELINT (electronic intelligence) spy planes to “not only skirt the Soviet borders but actually penetrate them in order to trigger otherwise inactive radar equipment and thus capture their telltale signals for later analysis. … That America engaged in such dangerous and provocative activities shocked both Martin and Mitchell.”

Unknown to the pair at the time, in September 1958 “an Air Force EC-130 had crashed inside Soviet Armenia; six crew members were killed and eleven others declared missing,” according to Bamford. When the NSA community learned of the incident a few months later, Martin and Mitchell decided that someone in Washington should be aware of the program.

They contacted Rep. Wayne Hayes (D, Ohio) to blow the whistle on the program. Hayes, whom Bamford described as “never accused of being one of Congress’ brightest members,” resigned from Congress in disgrace in 1976 when The Washington Post reported that Hayes had hired his mistress as a secretary. The mistress, Elizabeth Ray, admitted to the Post, “I can’t type. I can’t file. I can’t even answer the phone.”

The meeting with Hayes was described in the Congressional Quarterly Almanac (1960): “Mitchell and Martin also said that in February 1959 they had talked to ‘a Congressman who had publicly expressed concern over the State Department’s concealing from Congress pertinent facts’ about a U.S. C-130 plane shot down over Russia in September 1958. They said they informed the Congressman of the plane’s ‘intelligence mission,’ which Martin had learned of from an NSA ‘high official,’ but that their conversation with the Congressman was interrupted when he received a call from William Macomber, assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, who requested him to ‘refrain from further public discussion of the C-130 incident’.”

“To Martin and Mitchell, rapidly becoming disenchanted with American society as a whole, the lack of even a letter of acknowledgement from the congressman on an issue as important as the illegal ELINT flights was the last straw,” wrote Bamford. Around this time the men began planning to defect.

Defection

Andrew and Mitrokhin documented the pair’s initial efforts to defect. “In December 1959, Mitchell flew from Washington to Mexico City, in defiance of NSA regulations, entered the Soviet embassy and asked for political asylum in the USSR, giving ideological reasons as the motive for his action. The KGB residency made strenuous attempts to persuade him to stay on inside NSA as a defector-in-place, but without success. Mitchell agreed to a secret meeting with another KGB officer in Washington, but maintained his insistence on emigrating to the Soviet Union with Martin.”

Then, later that same month, according to NSA files, Martin “went to Cuba with Mitchell, without NSA permission and against its directives. Undated information in a UAC [Unamerican Activities Committee] report, doubtless pertaining to this period if not before, said he was a masochist and an agnostic; outspoken against the US and for SU [Soviet Union], which latter known to several dozen NSA employees but not to NSA security office. … This previous visit to Cuba and Mexico was unknown to NSA, which requires employees to report foreign visits to NSA Security prior to departure; neither Mitchell nor Martin so reported.”

The two men put their plan into action in June 1960, as described in NSA documents. “Mitchell and Martin went on summer leave together on June 24, telling fellow employees they might visit their parents, the Mitchells in Eureka, California, and the Martins in Ellensburg, Washington. They hinted that if they had not returned in two weeks, they would take another week of annual leave, returning on July 18. Thus, they were not missed until after July 18.”

Mitchell left $100 with his neighboring landlady, to pay rent on his house in Laurel Hills until August 15. Martin checked out of the Laurel motel where he lived.

At National Airport, both purchased one-way tickets to Mexico City on Eastern Airlines. The next day, they flew to Havana on Cubana Airlines. “There they were quietly hustled aboard a Soviet freighter … for their long voyage to their new homeland,” wrote Bamford.

According to Andrew and Mitrokhin, “Security was so lax at NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters that no attempt was made to track Mitchell and Martin down until eight days after they had been due to return from their three-week vacation.”

NSA Security broke into Mitchell’s house on Eighth Street in Laurel. As described by Bamford, “The agents found the house a shambles. One item that intrigued them was a key to a safe deposit box, which was apparently left for them to find. The agents quickly got in touch with the Maryland State Police, who obtained a court order to open the box, and then proceeded to the State Bank of Laurel” in the Laurel Shopping Center. “There they slipped the key into box number 174, rented under the name of Bernon F. Mitchell, and pulled out a sealed envelope, which bore on the top a request that the contents be made public. It was signed by both Martin and Mitchell.”

Laurel and DC police were notified and searched for the missing men. NSA Security, the FBI, and the CIA went into overdrive investigating the case. But the government hoped that the NSA’s secrecy would keep a lid on the whole affair, especially the contents of the envelope discovered in the safe deposit box at the Laurel Shopping Center.

Writer David Durant, in an article titled “The First NSA Defection: 1960” for the Cold War & Internal Security Collection at East Carolina University, wrote, “On August 1, the Department of Defense announced that Martin and Mitchell were missing, later acknowledging on August 5 that it was likely that the two men had fled to the Eastern Bloc. On August 11, 1960, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell were officially granted asylum in the USSR and each awarded a monthly allowance of 500 rubles, roughly equal to their NSA salaries.”

But the NSA tried to downplay the significance, according to Durant. “The official Defense Department account, of course, indicated that they were just junior code-breakers and couldn’t give away anything affecting the security of the country.”

Then, on September 6, Martin and Mitchell held a press conference in Moscow, during which Martin read to the assembled journalists the document they had left in the safe deposit box:

“We were employees of the highly secret National Security Agency, which gathers communications intelligence from almost all nations of the world for use by the U.S. Government. However, the simple act that the U.S. Government is engaged in delving into the secrets of other nations had little or nothing to do with our decision to defect. Our main dissatisfaction concerns some of the practices the United States uses in gathering intelligence information. We were worried about the U.S. policy of deliberately violating the airspace of other nations and the U.S. Government’s practice of lying about such violations in a manner intended to mislead public opinion. Furthermore, we were disenchanted by the U.S. Government’s practice of intercepting and deciphering the secret communications of its own allies. Finally, we objected to the fact that the U.S. Government was willing to go so far as to recruit agents from among the personnel of its allies.”

Among other things, NSA had to be concerned with what the two men might know—and pass on to the Russians—about a U-2 spy plane that was shot down by Russia just a few months prior to their defection. The U-2 pilot, Francis Gary Powers, survived the crash and was still in Russian custody at the time, undergoing extensive interrogation.

Internally, the NSA had a different version, at least after the investigation. In 1963 a study by the agency declared, “Beyond any doubt, no other event has had, or is likely to have in the future, a greater impact on the Agency’s security program.”

President Dwight Eisenhower called Mitchell and Martin “self-confessed turncoats” and former President Harry Truman said they “should be shot.”

In spite of the tremendous publicity victory for the Russians, publicly NSA said, “It is believed that there was very little damage” done to U.S. intelligence efforts. That turned out to be confirmed by ex-KGB agent Mitrokhin, who wrote that “KGB codebreakers were disappointed in the amount of detailed knowledge of NSA cryptanalysis possessed by Mitchell and Martin.”

In an article for NSA’s Cryptologic Almanac 50th Anniversary Series, David P. Mowry wrote, “Most of the information on organization and operations against the USSR and the PRC was undoubtedly already known to the Communists. Since cryptosystems cannot usually be replaced quickly, there is no evidence that the revelations concerning NSA’s attacks on the systems of U.S. allies had any effect. The Communist spymasters would undoubtedly have preferred Martin and Mitchell to remain in place as moles, since their information was dated as of the moment they left NSA.”

Life in the USSR

According to Andrew and Mitrokhin, “Within a few years the [Russians] found both Mitchell and Martin considerably more trouble than they were worth.” Both were given jobs and housing, but they soon yearned to be back in the United States.

A month after their news conference, The Washington Post reported that Martin had married a 29-year-old Soviet woman. In a Russian interview, Martin said his wife “is a wonderful Soviet girl, an excellent housekeeper, and I am very happy with her.” They divorced in 1963.

About 18 months later, Martin ran into a New York Times reporter in Leningrad and happily sat down for an interview. He was generally satisfied with life but had some complaints: “His impressions of what it would be like in the USSR had come from USSR and other Soviet propaganda magazines which were overly rosy … complained [Soviets] had promised he could live anywhere but wouldn’t let him leave Leningrad, which he wanted to do because his southern wife got asthma in the damp climate there.”

Writing in Salon.com, Rick Anderson said, “But as later news reports and NSA files would show, the duo quickly soured on Soviet life, concluding they made a mistake. Over the years, they repeatedly attempted to return to the U.S. if the government wouldn’t charge them with a crime (no deal, said the feds). … In a Soviet newspaper interview, Martin called his defection ‘foolhardy,’ but said he wasn’t ashamed.”

Both men were drinking heavily. According to government files, “Martin was described by one source as being ‘totally on the skids,’ an incurable alcoholic, and surrounded by degenerates and devoted to the practice of sexual perversions.”

Their repeated attempts over the ensuing years to return to the U.S. were denied. They had their U.S. citizenship stripped.

By using an Australian passport, Martin went to Mexico, where he died of cancer in 1987. Reportedly he was buried at an unknown location in the United States. Mitchell also married a Soviet woman. Their marriage lasted until his death in 2001. There were no children from either marriage.

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Kevin Leonard is a founding member of the Laurel History Boys and a two-time winner of the Maryland Delaware District of Columbia Press Association Journalism Award.