Ex-GI Charged as Soviet Spy in Cold War Era

Reaching back into the dark world of Cold War espionage, the FBI on Friday arrested a former soldier once assigned to the super-secret National Security Agency on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, plucking him out of an obscure life in rural Pennsylvania some 20 years after his alleged betrayal had ended.

The FBI arrested Robert Stephan Lipka, 50, at his home in Manor Township, Pa., in what sources suggested could be one of many long-dormant espionage cases to be reopened or resolved as a result of disclosures emerging from Moscow--and clues from defectors--after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Lipka, a clerical worker in the Army when he worked at the security agency, is charged with supplying at least three Soviet agents with top secret defense information in the form of reams of classified NSA Teletype printouts in a period from 1965 to the mid-1970s.

In court papers, the FBI detailed an undercover sting against Lipka that began as early as 1993. An FBI agent posed as a Russian spy who told Lipka that Moscow was trying to reestablish contact after decades of silence.

Federal prosecutors insisted Friday that, even though Lipka’s alleged espionage is part of America’s distant Cold War past and was on behalf of an adversary that no longer exists, it doesn’t lessen the damage he caused to U.S. national security.

At a time when the Vietnam War was raging and the U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff was intense, “He had access to the highest secrets of the U.S. government,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Barbara Cohan told a federal magistrate at Lipka’s hearing. “You only had to look at what was going on during 1965 and 1967 to infer what those secrets were.”

In its investigation of Lipka, the FBI gained the cooperation of an unidentified witness who has been granted immunity and who claims that she had long known of Lipka’s alleged espionage.

Yet the FBI first may have learned of the spying through a recent defector. While few defections have been in the news, sources said that at least two dozen officers of the Soviet KGB secret police have changed sides over the last 15 years--many of them since the Soviet empire began to unravel. It may be that Lipka was among the names of spy suspects that a KGB defector gave the FBI in the spring of 1993.

Author Ronald Kessler first disclosed in his book on the FBI that such a defector was working with the bureau and said Friday that sources he declined to identify told him that Lipka was among those accused by the defector.

To add to the intrigue surrounding the Lipka case, a 1994 book by a former KGB major general caught the eye of U.S. officials because it briefly mentioned that the KGB had a spy inside the NSA who had never been caught--and who fit Lipka’s description. Although the FBI’s investigation was underway before the book was published, the FBI used its contents in its undercover operation by sending Lipka pages from it in an effort to smoke him out.

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Intelligence officials said Lipka was not as big a spy as either infamous CIA mole Aldrich H. Ames or John A. Walker Jr., who ran a spy ring in the Navy. But Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB major general and author of the book, “The First Directorate,” which mentioned the Lipka case, said in an interview that the KGB considered any source at the NSA--which handles code-breaking and highly sensitive eavesdropping for the U.S. intelligence community--to be highly prized. The KGB paid him packages of as much as $1,000 at a time at dead-drop sites, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit.

In fact, the affidavit said that when Lipka was detailed to the NSA by the Army in 1964, he was told that he was replacing Jack Dunlap, another NSA clerical worker who had received $60,000 from the KGB, but who had committed suicide apparently because he feared that his spying was about to be uncovered.

Lipka told an undercover FBI agent that a colonel at the NSA told him at the time “that if he turned out to be like Jack, the colonel would personally shoot him.”

In his book, Kalugin said Lipka--whom he did not know by name and whom he identified only as a low-level soldier at the NSA--”handed us the NSA’s daily and weekly top-secret reports to the White House, copies of communications on U.S. troop movements around the world and communications among [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] allies.”

Intelligence sources said Lipka represents just one of many unsolved espionage cases that may still come back to haunt the U.S. intelligence community.

“The fact that this case is decades old suggests that there are hundreds and thousands of pieces that had to be collected to get a mosaic of a case that could be presented for prosecution,” observed Gerry Burke, a former assistant director of the NSA.

Lipka--a former coin dealer in Lancaster, Pa., who now is unemployed--was charged with conspiring with three Soviet operatives who have long since left the United States, to deliver classified communications intelligence.

If he is convicted he could be sentenced to life in prison.

The FBI did not disclose what prompted its investigation of Lipka. But beginning in May 1993, an undercover FBI agent, posing as Sergey Nikitin, a Russian military spy, met several times with Lipka in an attempt to convince him that Russia wanted to reestablish contact with its long-forgotten mole. In fact, the FBI was hoping that Lipka would start talking and provide details about his espionage.

Meeting first at a local Comfort Inn, the undercover FBI agent told Lipka: “We don’t forget our friends.” He said Russian military intelligence--the GRU--had taken over Lipka’s file from the KGB and wanted to discuss with him “how you started and how things went about so that we can learn from you.”

But it took time to persuade a suspicious Lipka. When the undercover agent said he did not know that Lipka was a good chess player, Lipka became extremely suspicious, because his code name with the KGB had been “rook,” the FBI said.

Lipka wrote “R---” on a piece of paper and asked the undercover agent to fill in the blanks of his code name “for purposes of identification.”

The next day, the FBI agent asked him: “Does rook have any meaning to you?”

Lipka’s reaction, captured on videotape, was “one of relief,” the FBI said. Lipka then shook Nikitin’s hand, exhaled and placed his hand over his heart.

Later, in their final meeting, the undercover agent gave Lipka $5,000, which Lipka claimed as long overdue payments from the KGB, according to the FBI.

The “cooperating witness,” described by a government source as a woman, said she had frequent contact with Lipka from 1965 until the late 1970s and that he admitted selling NSA material to the Russians during the winter of 1966-67. The witness said that Lipka told of doing so for some time, according to Whiteside’s affidavit.

Lipka told her he had removed documents from NSA headquarters at Ft. Meade, Md., by hiding them inside his shirt or wrapping them around his legs, noting that security personnel searched briefcases and packages but not people.

Times staff writer Elizabeth Shogren contributed to this story from Manor Township, Pa.