Ex-GI Seized as Top Spy in Ring Selling NATO Secrets : 10 Years of Espionage for Soviets

A former U.S. Army sergeant from Ohio who was arrested in West Germany headed an international spy ring that sold NATO defense secrets to the Soviets at high prices for a decade, officials said today.

“We can’t exclude the possibility that millions of dollars are involved,” said Alexander Prechtel, spokesman for the chief federal prosecutor’s office.

A second American soldier who was not identified received a “five-figure sum” of money for supplying the ring with military secrets, said Chief Federal Prosecutor Kurt Rebmann.

Prechtel said two Hungarian-born brothers arrested Tuesday in Sweden with cipher keys, coded messages and radios were a part of the ring.

It was too early to know how much damage was caused to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Prechtel said in an interview, but the ring is believed to have stolen documents concerning NATO defense plans for Europe and U.S. Army contingency plans for a ground war with the Soviet Union in Europe.

‘Compelling Suspicion’

Clyde Lee Conrad, the former sergeant, was arrested Tuesday, and a statement from the prosecutor’s office said he is charged with “compelling suspicion of espionage activities in an especially grave case.”

Conrad was born in 1947 in Ohio and worked for the U.S. military for 20 years, Prechtel said. He could not provide his hometown.

The spokesman said Conrad worked with classified military defense plans for seven years at an Army base in Bad Kreuznach in central West Germany and had access to a wide array of secret documents.

After his retirement, Conrad tried to recruit other soldiers for espionage, Rebmann said.

“He recruited another member of the U.S. Army for espionage work and paid him a five-figure sum for the delivery of military documents,” Rebmann’s statement said. The type of currency was not disclosed.

FBI’s ‘Intense Interest’

Rebmann said Conrad turned over the most recent batch of information to his Soviet Bloc contact in Vienna just last month.

In Washington, the State Department acknowledged that West Germany made an arrest but refused to comment further.

Justice Department spokesman John Russell said his department and the FBI are well aware of the case but are not involved in it.

But FBI spokesman Milt Ahlerich said: “It is a matter of intense interest to the FBI.”

A special panel of West Germany’s Supreme Court ordered Conrad held in prison pending further investigation.

Prechtel said the West German-based spy ring started in the late 1970s and used couriers from Sweden.

2 Brothers Confess

In Goteborg, Sweden, authorities said they detained two Hungarian-born brothers who confessed to working for the Hungarian secret service. The two men, physicians who immigrated to Sweden in the 1960s, were detained with radios, cipher keys and coded messages, authorities said. Their names were not released.

“We have worked in cooperation with German police because it was very important to arrest these people at the same time so they could not warn each other,” said Torsten Bjorkhede, chief of the Swedish security police.

Sven-Olof Hakansson, chief prosecutor of the Goteborg district, said the two traveled several times to West Germany and had been under surveillance for several years.

The New York Times reported today that Swedish and West German authorities arrested eight people in the ring operating through a German-Hungarian connection.

The report said investigators believe that the spy ring provided U.S., West German and NATO secrets to the Hungarian intelligence agency. The Hungarians then shared the secrets with the Soviet Union, officials told the newspaper.