Found Replacing Ideology in Recent Cases : Money Seen as Motivating Today’s Spies

William Holden Bell was a vulnerable man. His 19-year-old son had died in an accident in 1975. His marriage had broken up a year later. He was bankrupt, saddled with heavy alimony payments, unhappy in his job and under investigation by the Internal Revenue Service. He was approaching 60.

In 1977, trying to make a new start, he remarried. He also formed a close friendship with a young Polish national named Marian Zacharski, who was not a great deal older than Bell’s dead son. They played tennis together at the Playa del Rey apartment complex where they lived, brought their families together on important social occasions and swapped talk about their seemingly very different professions.

Gradually, the friendship developed into a business association. Zacharski represented a Polish machinery company. Bell, a radar engineer at the Hughes Aircraft Co. plant in El Segundo, also began working in what he considered a paid-technical consultant’s position with the Polish company. As it turned out, however, his young friend was also an undercover Polish intelligence officer assigned to recruit spies within the California aerospace industry.

Eventually, the financially troubled Bell crossed the line into full-fledged espionage. By the time the FBI caught up with him in June, 1981, he had handed Polish agents classified documents that had saved the Soviet Bloc years of work and hundreds of millions of dollars in matching several sophisticated new U.S. weapons systems and developing their own defenses against them. Bell pleaded guilty to espionage charges in 1981 and was sentenced to eight years in prison and fined $10,000.

Like John A. Walker Jr., accused of spying for the Russians for nearly 20 years before his ex-wife went to the FBI, Bell has come to be viewed as a prototype of the modern American turncoat.

Whereas past breaches of U.S. security often involved men and women with left-wing ideological leanings, today’s spies seem to be motivated by a simpler craving--for money.

From Bell, who sold secret radar information on the U.S. F-15 fighter, the B-1 and Stealth bombers and the Phoenix missile system in exchange for $110,000, to the Walker family, which may also have received more than $100,000, money has consistently been the enticement for Americans charged with selling out to the Soviet Bloc in recent years.

‘Selling . . . for Cash’

Adm. Bobby R. Inman, former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said: “I don’t know of a single case in the last 15 years where ideology had any role at all. The people are selling secrets for cash.”

In the years leading up to and immediately following World War II, most espionage cases hinged on the radical sympathies of individuals such as British spies Klaus Fuchs and Kim Philby and Americans Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

These days, such political factors are notably absent.

“The Russians trust an American dealing with them for money much more than they trust an American dealing with them for ideological reasons,” said John F. Donnelly, the Defense Department’s director of counterintelligence and investigation programs.

“They are convinced, and they teach in their intelligence schools, that Americans are by nature avaricious. Even if somebody does give them something for ideological reasons or because of disgruntlement, they will attempt to pay him the second or third time they deal with him. They just feel more comfortable if they have a guy on the payroll.”

Disturbing Questions

The increasing frequency with which such financially motivated turncoats are being exposed raises disturbing questions.

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, there was not a single federal prosecution for espionage. But since 1975, 37 cases have been prosecuted, 27 of them involving the Soviet Bloc.

Ironically, the long period when no spy was brought to court coincided with the Vietnam War and rampant disaffection with the government. The upsurge in arrests and the practice of selling military secrets have surfaced at a time when the military has recovered respect and patriotism has come into vogue.

Some intelligence officials believe that the increasing evidence of espionage activity is a fallout from the years of U.S.-Soviet detente, when vigilance against Soviet spying was relaxed. Others contend that the sale of military secrets reflects growing materialism in an age preoccupied with personal success.

What is not clear is whether espionage has actually increased in proportion to the arrests and indictments or whether it only looks more widespread because more cases are being uncovered and prosecuted.

Some government officials believe both are true.

Two Factors Cited

In the wake of the first arrests in the Walker case, Assistant Atty. Gen. Stephen S. Trott attributed the apparent increase to two main factors. “I believe,” he said, “and the people with whom I have consulted believe, that there is both more espionage going on now, No. 1, and, No. 2, we’ve gotten a lot better at detecting it.”

Since 1972, the number of Communist Bloc officials assigned to the United States has doubled as trade increased and diplomatic relations thawed. Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) estimates that there are as many as 1,000 Soviet intelligence agents in the United States, with a prime mission of enlisting American help in gathering sensitive military information.

Their potential targets have increased dramatically. New technology has made even relatively prosaic weapons such as tanks, once of little interest to undercover agents, subjects of prime interest to Soviet intelligence in its quest to keep pace with U.S. capabilities.

The increased Soviet espionage effort has been confronted in recent years by a substantially beefed-up U.S. counterintelligence program. And the government has adopted a far more aggressive course in prosecutions, even at the risk of revealing sensitive information and exposing its own undercover operatives.

The tougher tack was begun in the Gerald R. Ford Administration and was continued through the Jimmy Carter years into the Reagan presidency.

Small Number Unmasked

In his book recounting the regulation of intelligence and counterintelligence activities, former Atty. Gen. Griffin B. Bell said that the 13 persons charged with espionage between 1975 and 1980 represented only a small percentage of the spies who were unmasked by federal agents.

“Some fled the country,” he said, “others were declared persona non grata and sent home, while still others became double agents. Some cases were also under investigation by counterintelligence agencies of Canada and Britain and were disposed of by those nations.”

The spreading Walker scandal and its renewed demonstration that American military secrets can be bought already has set off re-examination of U.S. security policies and generated new calls for reform.

In an interview, Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III called for cutting back the store of classified information until it includes only material “really critical to the national interest,” he said.

Beyond that, he urged a sharp reduction in the number of people with access to “the most sensitive information,” revision of the penalty structure to make it a stronger deterrent to spying, and more penetrating background investigations of applicants for security clearances.

‘System Is in Chaos’

“The current system,” said Sen. Albert Gore Jr. (D-Tenn.), a member of the Government Affairs permanent investigations subcommittee, “is in chaos. It is an assembly-line process--fast-food security--and that must be changed.”

Sens. William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.) and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the subcommittee’s chairman and top-ranking Democrat, urged President Reagan Thursday to issue an executive order directing federal agencies to work toward cutting their security clearances in half within the next two years.

Long-Delayed Reform

Nunn and Roth also urged a reduction in the volume of protected material and called on the White House National Security Council to press ahead with its long-delayed reform of the classification system.

“If the NSC does not act,” Nunn told reporters, “it is my view that Congress will be forced to act.”

The situation that Gore describes as “chaos” is, more than anything else, a consequence of the staggering size of the country’s security establishment. Its rampant growth has kept pace with the increasing sophistication of military weaponry and the Reagan Administration’s pouring of additional billions into the modernization of the country’s defense forces.

More Clearances Issued

Some 4.3 million Americans in government and industry now carry clearances giving them access to classified information, among them an army of defense contractor employees whose ranks have grown by 44% just since 1979 and now number about 1.5 million.

Within industry, some 900,000 workers have information classified as “secret” and more than 100,000 have approval for “top secret” material.

Government security rolls add up to more than 2.7 million civil servants, political appointees and military personnel with security clearances.

“This has reached the ridiculous point,” said Sen. John Glenn (D-Ohio). “When you walk down the street, two of every 100 people you meet are cleared for classified information. It has come to the point where you are a second-class citizen if you are not cleared for secret information.”

To carry out investigations, provide clearances and oversee security paper work, a massive federal bureaucracy has come into being, but it is increasingly strained by the still more massive scope of its task.

Million Investigations

Last year, the Pentagon’s Defense Investigative Service conducted more than a million investigations, and the Office of Personnel Management carried out 245,000.

Between 1980 and 1984, OPM received 138,252 requests for security clearances and granted 138,144, one of the statistics leading to Gore’s charge of “fast-food security.”

Industry clearance requests to the Pentagon have soared to as many as 26,000 in a single month. In the field, the Pentagon’s Defense Investigative Service has less than 200 inspectors to keep track of some 14,000 contractor-operated plants and facilities with custody of 16 million classified government documents, estimated to represent a single stack eight times taller than the Washington Monument.

Critics contend that the first priority of reform should be to reduce the number of security clearances granted and the masses of material protected by classification.

Moreover, experts say there is a persistent tendency toward over-classification, to protect too much material and to assign higher classifications than can be justified. Atty. Gen. Meese cited an example just last week of a “confidential” classification being assigned to an early draft of one of President Reagan’s speeches.

‘Lack of Respect’

Such over-classification, said an official who has worked on most of the major espionage cases of the last several years, “breeds a lack of respect for safeguarding material that really deserves the protection.”

Until the Walker case broke, more of the seriously damaging recent spy cases involved civilians. Most notorious of all were Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee, who sold top-secret satellite information stolen from the vault at TRW to Soviet intelligence. Later, their story was told in “The Falcon and the Snowman,” a best-selling book and movie. Boyce, the “Falcon,” was sent to prison for 40 years, and Lee, the “Snowman,” for life.

The case of James D. Harper Jr. had as much impact as the Boyce-Lee scandal. Harper was convicted of selling Polish intelligence secret information on the U.S. Minuteman missile’s ability to survive attack and, in 1984, was sent to prison for life without parole. He had obtained the information from his wife, who was a bookkeeper and executive secretary for Systems Control Inc. of Palo Alto, which had numerous contracts from the Ballistic Missile Defense Center in Huntsville, Ala.

His case touched off a major Pentagon study of the Defense Department’s industrial security program and about two dozen recommendations for tightening security procedures.

Still, said Maynard C. Anderson, director of the Defense Department’s Security Plans and Programs, the impression that the problem is more severe in industry than in government is probably wrong.

‘Industry Is Most Careful’

“Industry, in fact, probably has a better application of security measure across the board than the government does,” he said. “For one thing, classified information is never given to industry on a permanent basis; it is loaned, and that improves accountability. Secondly, industry is most careful about protecting its proprietary information.”

Despite the step-up in U.S. counterintelligence activities, it is still estimated that it would take 10 years for the Defense Department to again question all holders of top-secret security clearances that are now more than five years old.

Last year, the Defense Department launched efforts to screen longstanding top-secret clearances in the hope of identifying persons who, because of personal and financial difficulties, might have become vulnerable to Soviet agents with ready cash.

In his own case, Bell later said that such a screening would have undoubtedly pinpointed him as a security risk before he began selling secrets to his Polish friend.