Court Cites Drug Use in Denying Accused Spy Bail

Former National Security Agency analyst Ronald W. Pelton used illicit drugs and had injected an opiate only three or four days before his arrest last month on espionage charges, according to a confidential report cited in a federal court hearing Tuesday.

U.S. District Judge Frank Kaufman noted the report, a court evaluation of Pelton’s background, in denying a second request to release the accused spy for the Soviets on bail from a Maryland prison.

According to the report, Pelton “acknowledged the illicit use of an opiate-based drug for two or three months on an intermittent basis and last used the drug on an intravenous basis three or four days before his arrest,” Kaufman said.

Addiction Denied

Pelton’s attorney, Fred Warren Bennett, later said that Pelton admitted using a prescription drug called Dilaudid for “recreational” use. He said Pelton was not addicted to that or other drugs.

Dilaudid is the brand name of the narcotic hydromorphone hydrochloride, a highly habit-forming painkiller derived from morphine.

Pelton, 44, is charged with selling a classified report on the Soviet Union and other secrets to Moscow for five years after he left the NSA in 1979. Federal prosecutors say that Pelton admitted the actions in two lengthy talks with FBI agents in an Annapolis, Md., hotel last month.

In rejecting the plea, Kaufman said the danger that Pelton might flee the country and provide new secrets to the Soviets “seems to be so clearly presented that there is little need to review in detail” the facts of the case.

Bennett argued Tuesday that Pelton had essentially been tricked by two FBI agents into making false and “hypothetical” admissions of guilt during the Annapolis meetings.

Not ‘a Shred of Evidence’

The government’s remaining arguments for keeping Pelton jailed are not backed by “a shred of evidence,” Bennett said.

But Kaufman disagreed, totaling what he called “pluses and minuses” in Pelton’s background. Besides the apparent drug use, he said, the weight of evidence against Pelton and the potential life prison sentence for spying “in itself raises the possibility of flight and raises the possibility of serious danger to the community.”