FBI Arrests Ex-G.I. Charged With Spying for East Bloc : Espionage: The former sergeant is held in Florida. He is accused of selling secrets to Hungarian and Czechoslovak agents.

FBI agents in Tampa, Fla., arrested a former Army sergeant Thursday night on charges of taking part in an espionage ring found to have “endangered the entire defense capability of the West” by selling secrets to Hungarian and Czechoslovakian agents.

Roderick James Ramsay, 28, was charged with gathering or delivering what FBI Director William S. Sessions described as “extremely sensitive” information to a foreign government while serving in West Germany between 1983 and 1985.

Ramsay was allegedly recruited by then-Army Sgt. Clyde Lee Conrad, who paid him $20,000 to videotape highly classified documents, including North Atlantic Treaty Organization defense plans for Central Europe. The documents were then sold to Eastern Bloc agents.

A West German court convicted Conrad on Wednesday of high treason and sentenced the 43-year-old retired sergeant to life in prison for what the chief prosecutor said was a case of treason unprecedented in its seriousness.

Federal officials said that the investigation is likely to result in further arrests of other former U.S. soldiers. Sessions described the inquiry as one of the “most complicated foreign counterintelligence investigations ever conducted by the FBI.”

If convicted of the espionage charge, Ramsay could be sentenced to life in prison.

The secrets allegedly sold by the Army sergeants were so detailed that in the event of an East Bloc attack, Western defenses in Germany would have collapsed before they could have formed, according to the West German judge who presided over Conrad’s trial.

Conrad, who was Ramsay’s superior, is believed to have been paid more than $1.2 million by East Bloc agents for nuclear and conventional battle plans that he provided them between 1976 and 1988, three years after he retired with an honorable discharge.

The two U.S. sergeants worked together as clerks with top-secret clearances in the archives of the Army’s 8th Infantry Division in Bad Kreuznach, West Germany. They handled all classified government and military documents in the unit’s planning section.

Among the documents Ramsay allegedly provided to Conrad were some dealing with the use of tactical nuclear weapons by the United States and its NATO allies. Other documents detailed secret military communications technology, according to an FBI affidavit in the case.

In one weeklong incident around December, 1985, Ramsay is alleged to have videotaped hundreds of documents and made those tapes available to Conrad for sale to Hungarian and Czechoslovak intelligence services.

Later, after the two had left the Army, Conrad allegedly gave Ramsay a cow bell to use as a signal to identify himself to others involved in the espionage ring, according to the affidavit.

“There has been no case of treason even remotely comparable in its seriousness,” chief West German federal prosecutor Kurt Remann said last week in summing up the Conrad case--the first espionage trial of a foreign resident living in West Germany.

In addition to the life sentence for Conrad, the West German court ordered the forfeiture of approximately $1.7 million and the seizure of all his personal property. Authorities have not recovered money that they believe he was paid for spying. In sentencing Conrad, Justice Ferdinand Schuth described the white-haired defendant as “ice cold and unscrupulous,” adding that he was motivated by “pure greed.” It was Schuth who described the spy ring as having endangered the security of the West.

Conrad was arrested by West German authorities in August, 1988, in the West German city of Kaiserslautern, near Bad Kreuznach, where he lived with his German-born wife and 15-year-old son. The area is about 50 miles southwest of Frankfurt.

In March, 1989, while Conrad was awaiting trial, U.S. officials said that as many as five retired American soldiers were under investigation on suspicion of assisting the retired sergeant in the espionage. All of them had returned to the United States, the officials said.

Conrad’s contact with Hungarian agents was made in 1975 through his then-superior, former U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Zoltan Szabo, who himself was convicted of spying by an Austrian court last year. Szabo, who received a 10-month suspended sentence, cooperated in the prosecution of Conrad by providing evidence against him.

Conrad’s two Hungarian contacts, brothers Imre and Sandor Kercsik, were arrested at the same time as Conrad. They were taken into custody in Gothenburg, Sweden, where they worked as physicians. The Kercsiks, who admitted being agents of the Hungarian secret police, were convicted of possessing NATO defense material.

In an unusual twist in the Conrad case, he was found to have posed as a Hungarian intelligence agent to obtain $50,000 from the CIA for information about a purported U.S. Army spy ring working for the Hungarians, according to U.S. officials.