Ronald Pelton
Not wanting to leave any agency out of the mix, we come to Ronald William Pelton who worked for the NSA.
Ronald William Pelton (born November 18, 1941) was a National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence analyst who was convicted in 1986 of spying for and selling secrets to the Soviet Union. One operation he compromised was Operation Ivy Bells.
What is interesting about Pelton is it appears he did not become a spy until after he left government service. As we have seen in several cases, money was the issue, and Pelton wanted it.
He told his son he wanted to buy the family a big farm. He told a business associate he was planning a major contribution to his church. He promised his mistress a yacht, a house in Georgetown and a trip to Rome.
Even though Pelton tried to present the picture of a major international money broker, he actually never made more the 21k a year working at a landscaping company, that was until he started selling secrets to the KGB
Pelton contacted the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C. on January 14, 1980, and arranged for a meeting at the embassy. The FBI had surveillance on the embassy and had tapped the phone. Therefore, it anticipated the arrival of the caller but was unable to observe him in time to determine his identity. He was debriefed by KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko and disclosed Operation Ivy Bells, an NSA and United States Navy program to surreptitiously wiretap undersea cables to monitor Soviet military communications and track Soviet submarines.
On trips to Vienna in 1980 and 1983, Pelton stayed at the residence of the Soviet Ambassador to Austria and underwent debriefing sessions that sometimes lasted eight hours a day with KGB officer Anatoly Slavnov. Even though Pelton had left the NSA, he may have continued to be valuable to the Soviets as an intelligence consultant, helping them interpret data picked up from other sources. Pelton had no classified documents to offer but relied on his memory to provide information. He was paid about $37,000 by the Soviets.
