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For all the embarrassment that it caused the U.S., the Moscow sideshow was not unexpected. Last July, when Martin and Mitchell did not come back from a sum mer vacation, NSA men broke into Mitchell's home in Laurel, Md. They found the place a shambles, and they were par ticularly intrigued by a set of safe-deposit keys. Maryland State Police got a court order to open Mitchell's safe-deposit box in the State Bank of Laurel, and there, indeed, was the typewritten defection statement.
Belatedly, just about every security agency in Washington—both military and civilian—began working back over the Mitchell-Martin records and their own personnel clearance policies. NSA farms out the major part of its security checks to military intelligence agencies, and when the two men first came to work, neither the Office of Naval Intelligence nor the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations found a trace of trouble on their records.
The FBI discovered that last winter the two buddies made a trip to Mexico and took the trouble to hide their travels from their superiors. Upon re-examining the record of a routine lie-detector test, the FBI found signs that Mitchell was something less than emotionally robust. Agents also discovered that he had been consult ing a private psychiatrist, presumably out of concern for homosexual tendencies.
Shocking Breach. Had any of this information turned up in time, NSA might have checked more closely on its men. But there had been an even more obvious signal for caution. When a U.S.A.F. C-130 plane was shot down near Soviet Armenia in 1958, Martin and Mitchell were convinced that the plane and its crew were involved in espionage, were offended with the U.S. claim that the plane had been attacked in innocent flight. They took their suspicions to Ohio Congressman Wayne Hays, who had spoken out against the secrecy surrounding the C-130 flight. A cursory glance at some plastic-covered identification cards convinced Hays that the men worked for the CIA. He wrote their names down on the back of his checkbook and discussed their information informally, he says, with another member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Then the matter was dropped. The simple and shocking breach of security by supposed members of the CIA was brought to no one's attention.
The CIA traced their escape route through Mexico City to Fidel Castro's Havana, which is apparently the new jumping-off point for Moscow. The rest of the trip was possibly by Soviet trawler. Martin and Mitchell themselves were smugly silent about their escape route because, they said, other defectors may want to follow them.
President Eisenhower denounced both men as traitors and suggested that the entire U.S. security-clearance procedure be reviewed. Harry Truman thought they should be shot. The U.S. intelligence community braced for an onslaught of congressional investigations. Meanwhile, back in Moscow, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, their babbling press conference brought to a halt by a Soviet official who thought it was going on too long, began to sink into the limbo that the Soviet Union reserves for turncoats who have been milked of their last drop of propaganda value.