Ex-GI Arrested in NATO Spy Case : Retired Sergeant, 2 Others Accused of Passing Allied Secrets to East Bloc

U.S., West German and Swedish authorities have broken a major spy ring centered on a retired U.S. Army sergeant who allegedly sold secret plans for the defense of Europe to Soviet Bloc agents, officials said Thursday.

The retired sergeant first class, Clyde Lee Conrad of Sebring, Ohio, was a custodian of top-secret documents at a U.S. Army archive in West Germany and allegedly sold U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization plans for repelling a Soviet ground attack on Western Europe. The sales occurred over a period of at least seven years, West German officials said, and continued after Conrad’s retirement in 1985.

West German police arrested Conrad, 42, on Tuesday in Kaiserslautern, a city near several U.S. bases where he had lived since his retirement.

Hungarian-Born Brothers

At the same time, Swedish authorities detained two Hungarian-born brothers who were believed to have received secret documents from Conrad and transmitted them to Hungary’s intelligence service.

U.S. officials said they believe that the Hungarian intelligence service quickly turned over any useful data obtained in the operation to the Soviet Union.

Conrad provided the Hungarians with U.S. and NATO plans for turning back a Soviet ground attack, including critical troop deployment data, Bonn officials said. According to West German press accounts, Conrad also sold microfilm containing details of NATO missile sites and fuel pipelines in Europe.

West German chief prosecutor Kurt Rebmann said that the charges against Conrad represent “an especially grave case” of espionage. He said that Conrad personally delivered documents to Soviet Bloc agents in Vienna “in exchange for a large sum of money” as recently as last month.

Reagan Administration officials said investigators still are trying to determine how large the spy ring was, how long it operated and how much damage it did.

“It’s hit us like a thunderclap,” said one. “There’s a very, very intense damage assessment under way.”

But a Justice Department spokesman said it did not appear that the operation would prove as damaging as the Walker family spy ring, which sold U.S. Navy communications codes and other secrets to the Soviet Union for 18 years.

“It’s severe, but I’m told it’s not as bad as the Walker case,” spokesman John Russell said. “This case didn’t last 18 years, and it apparently doesn’t involve codes.”

Other Soldier Suspected

A West German official said that several other people, including at least one U.S. soldier still on active duty, are under investigation in the case. He said Conrad is believed to have paid one GI, whom he allegedly recruited after his retirement, a “five-figure sum” in exchange for information that was then provided to the Hungarians.

The FBI, the CIA and U.S. Army investigators all are aiding West German and Swedish authorities in the inquiry, officials said.

Conrad’s arrest was the result of a “long, close and careful cooperation” between U.S. intelligence and German security services, including lengthy surveillance and electronic intercepts, said Alexander Prechtel, a spokesman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe, West Germany.

In his written statement, prosecutor Rebmann said the charge against Conrad was “compelling suspicion of espionage activities in an especially grave case.”

He said Conrad had been a custodian of top secret documents at the U.S. Army’s 8th Infantry Division archives at Bad Kreuznach, a town west of the West German city of Mainz, for seven years before his retirement from the Army. U.S. Army records show that Conrad served at the division’s headquarters from 1974 through 1979 and again from 1980 through 1985.

“In this capacity he had access to secret military plans, especially including defense plans,” Rebmann’s statement said. “The accused is under compelling suspicion of having delivered these documents to a Soviet Bloc secret service by means of a command officer and couriers living abroad in return for high payment.

2nd Soldier Not Identified

“After he left the army he attempted to recruit agents for his contact,” Rebmann said. “He recruited another member of the U.S. Army for espionage and paid him a five-figure sum for military documents.”

Officials would not name the American serviceman or detail what information he provided.

It was not immediately clear whether the 8th Division archives, where Conrad worked, contained only that unit’s war plans or more extensive military planning documents. But even one division’s deployment plans, involving nearly 15,000 men and hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces, could prove invaluable to the enemy in wartime, U.S. officials noted.

In Sweden, Goteborg Chief Prosecutor Sven-Olof Hakansson told a news conference that two Hungarian-born brothers, both physicians who had acquired Swedish citizenship, had been charged with acting as couriers for Conrad on vacation trips to Hungary.

“They have admitted they were recruited, that they have received documents and taken them to Hungary,” Hakansson said.

He also said that the two brothers, who were not identified, had received instructions by shortwave radio and transported secret information from meeting places in Western Europe to Hungary. Police confiscated shortwave radios, codes and materials written in Hungarian when they arrested the brothers, the Associated Press reported.

The action against the espionage ring first was reported by Swedish television and by the New York Times.

Conrad is being held in West Germany on suspicion of espionage, but the charge could be raised to treason, German officials said. Justice Department spokesman Russell said the U.S.-West German extradition treaty would not allow the extradition of Conrad to the United States on espionage charges.

However, Conrad might be vulnerable to U.S. military charges for espionage committed while he was on active duty in the Army, he noted.

Conrad was a career infantryman who enlisted in the Army at age 18, soon after his graduation from Sebring-McKinley High School in Sebring, a rural town of about 5,000 southeast of Cleveland.

Joe Igro Jr., one of his classmates, remembered Conrad as an average student who excelled in running the mile on the high school track team.

“He was the quiet type,” Igro said. “Everybody liked him.”

Conrad turned up at his 20th high school reunion in 1985, Igro said. “All he talked about was that he was retiring (from the Army) and getting out,” Igro recalled.

Sheryl Egli, another classmate, said Conrad told her that he had married a German woman and planned to stay in West Germany.

Both Igro and Egli said they remembered Conrad’s family as being relatively poor and said they believed that was why he made the Army his career.

Army records show that Conrad served as a combat infantryman in Vietnam in 1966 and 1967 and was reassigned to West Germany in 1967.

He served in West Germany until he retired in September, 1985, with the exception of a 14-month period in 1979 and 1980 when he served briefly with the 17th Infantry Division at Ft. Ord in California and studied German at the Defense Languages Institute in Monterey.

He won the Meritorious Service Medal and the Army Commendation Medal, among other decorations.

The disclosure of the spy ring this week marks the latest of several espionage cases involving U.S. military personnel or government employees during the last three years.

Others included John A. Walker Jr., the retired Navy communications expert who was arrested in 1985 and later convicted of espionage; Jonathan Jay Pollard, a Navy employee arrested in 1985 and later convicted of spying for Israel; Larry Wu-tai Chin, a CIA analyst arrested in 1985 and convicted of spying for China; Ronald W. Pelton, a National Security Agency employee arrested in 1985 and convicted of selling secrets to the Soviet Union, and Edward Lee Howard, a former CIA employee who defected to the Soviet Union in 1985.

Last January, Army Sgt. Daniel W. Richardson was arrested in Maryland for attempting to sell documents to a man he believed to be a Soviet agent, but who was in reality a federal agent.

In addition, the government charged two Marine guards at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in 1987 with allowing the KGB secret police to penetrate the embassy, but the case against the guards later collapsed.

The Conrad case probably will cast a pall over the increasingly warm U.S. relationship with Hungary, which has launched the most ambitious economic reforms in the Soviet Bloc.

Only last month, Hungarian Communist Party chief Karoly Grosz made a 10-day official visit to the United States and was given a gala lunch with President Reagan, rare honors for a Soviet Bloc leader.

“We do have a growing special relationship with Hungary, but one should not romanticize it too far,” a State Department official said. “The intelligence services in those governments are probably the last to be affected by the process of liberalization. Most of the top guys cut their teeth in the Stalinist Era, and those are the methods they still use.”

Doyle McManus reported from Washington and William Tuohy from Bonn. Times staff writers John M. Broder, Paul Houston, Robert L. Jackson and Mark Lawrence also contributed to this story.