THE COLD WAR: Traitors' Day in Moscow

  • Share
  • Read Later

In the California seacoast town of Eureka, friends knew Bernon F. Mitchell as an average kind of kid—not too much of an athlete, but fun at parties and an enthusiastic skindiver. Later, at Stanford University, he had a lot of trouble with languages, so he switched courses and became a statistician. Up north, in Ellensburg, Wash., William Martin was the same sort of fellow. He was a good chess player and a mean hand at the piano, and he made a hobby of hypnotism. At the University of Washington he worked hard at his studies, was a topnotch math and science student. When the two young bachelors met during Navy duty in Japan, they became fast friends. When they both signed up to work for the super-secret National Security Agency in Washington three years ago, they seemed ready and willing to settle down to a life of official, patriotic anonymity.

Last week, some 5,000 miles east of anonymity, Mitchell. 31, and Martin, 29, sat in the splash of TV lights in the vast, gilded theater of the House of Journalists in Moscow. Newsmen from the Commu nist and non-Communist world had been summoned to a special press conference to hear them. While the Communists smiled and applauded and Westerners in the audience felt sick at heart, the two renounced their U.S. citizenship, retailed what they knew or suspected about secret U.S. intelligence activities, and pushed the current Soviet propaganda line that the U.S. is risking the peace of the world by persistent espionage. They also demonstrated beyond a doubt that there are serious flaws in U.S. security procedures.

Desirable Mates. First Mitchell and Martin read from a photostat of a statement that they had left behind in a Laurel, Md. safe-deposit box—a maneuver designed to prove that they had made up their minds well out of reach of Russian brainwashing. They had "sought citizenship in the Soviet Union." said the two, because they had learned that the U.S. lies, because its secret agents spy on both hostile and friendly powers, because its international operatives manipulate money and military supplies in an effort to overthrow unfriendly governments.

U.S. policy, they said, was a buildup for preventive war, which would leave its victors, at best, "emperors over the graveyard of civilization." Moreover, said the two bachelors, "the talents of women are encouraged and utilized to a much greater extent in the Soviet Union than in the U.S. We feel that this enriches Soviet society and makes Soviet women more desirable as mates."

"Prefer to Crawl." In a second, long, made-in-Moscow statement, they attacked the "Eisenhower-Nixon Adminis tration," accused the U.S. of spying on its allies and deliberately violating the airspace of other nations. They spilled all they apparently knew about the code-cracking and cryptographic activities of the National Security Agency. They highlighted the whole performance by quoting Arizona's Red-hating Senator Barry Goldwater's warning that "there are among us those who would prefer to crawl to Moscow on their bellies rather than face the possibility of an atomic war." Said Mitchell-Martin: "We do not hesitate to include ourselves in the company mentioned by Senator Goldwater."

  1. Previous Page
  2. 1
  3. 2