Spy Suspect Denied Bail; U.S. Case Called Weak

A 26-year-old messenger accused of trying to sell the Soviets top-secret information pilfered from Capitol Hill was ordered held without bond Tuesday night, even though a federal magistrate who presided over his preliminary hearing expressed sharp skepticism over the government’s case.

Four hours after the magistrate concluded there was “just barely” sufficient evidence to send the case against Randy Miles Jeffries to a federal grand jury, Jeffries’ court-appointed lawyer lost an appeal to U.S. District Judge Joyce H. Green to have the messenger released on bond.

Green said: “The nature and the circumstance of the charged offense is extraordinarily serious, involving as it does this country’s national defense and including alleged delivery and attempted delivery of top-secret . . . documents to Soviet officials.” She concluded there was insufficient assurance that Jeffries would not flee to avoid prosecution.

Jeffries, an employee of a stenographic firm that records the proceedings of secret testimony before congressional committees, was arrested Dec. 21 after meeting in a downtown Washington hotel room with an undercover agent of the FBI, who posed as an official of the Soviet Union.

According to FBI testimony, Jeffries had contacted the Soviets on Dec. 14 and had delivered to them sample portions of secret and top-secret reports he had obtained while working for the stenographic firm, promising to deliver the remainder of the documents in exchange for $5,000.

Bolstered Case

When the messenger, who has a police record of drug abuse, was brought before federal magistrate Jean F. Dwyer on Monday, Dwyer told government lawyers the information they had presented would not withstand challenge, saying the prosecution’s evidence was “as thin an affidavit as it has been my misfortune to see in many years.”

Tuesday, the government sought to bolster its case, adding evidence that a witness had seen Jeffries in possession of the secret documents in question, and stressing the extremely sensitive nature of the material that had been presented before a House Armed Services subcommittee.

But, after the second hourlong hearing, Dwyer remained skeptical, telling assistant U.S. Atty. Rhonda Fields: “Frankly, I don’t see that the case has gained very much weight overnight since our discussion yesterday.”

Noting the seriousness of the charge, however, she ordered Jeffries held without bail.

In a surprising twist to the case, Allen Dale, Jeffries’ lawyer, told the magistrate he had learned that the documents the government contends the defendant planned to turn over to the Soviets were left in a locked briefcase with a friend of Jeffries’ and have been destroyed. Dale refused to disclose the name of the person who told him of the material’s destruction.

After Dale appealed the magistrate’s refusal to set bail, Judge Green spent much of Christmas Eve afternoon listening to a recording of the testimony before Dwyer.

When Green denied bail for the defendant, she took a sharply different view of the prosecution’s evidence, saying: “The government’s case is substantial, and, at this juncture in the proceedings, the weight of evidence against the defendant is persuasive.”

A memorandum introduced in the magistrate’s hearing Tuesday identified one of the documents that Jeffries proposed to sell to the Soviets as “Department of Defense Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence Programs, C3-1, closed session, Subcommittee on Procurement and Military Nuclear Systems, Committee on Armed Services.”

Hiding Documents

The government also contended that Jeffries told another person of hiding secret documents belonging to the stenographic firm and later retrieving them in hopes of selling them to the Soviets.

Jeffries’ seizure is the latest in a series of arrests in a rash of espionage cases during 1985. If convicted, he could receive a sentence of life imprisonment.

Already the case has touched off a new review of House procedures to protect highly classified material.