A Look at Some Other Major Espionage Cases

* George Trofimoff, a retired Army Reserve colonel, was arrested in Florida and charged last year with spying for the former Soviet Union and Russia for 25 years. He is the highest-ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage. A civilian worker in Army intelligence in Germany, he allegedly was recruited into the KGB in 1969. He is accused of photographing U.S. documents and passed the film to KGB agents, and was later recruited into the KGB.

* In 1997, Earl Pitts, who was stationed at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va., was sentenced to 27 years in prison after admitting he spied for Moscow during and after the Cold War. Pitts was an attorney and a 13-year veteran of the FBI. He had access to sensitivem highly classied operations that included recruiting Russian intelligence officers, double-agent operations and surveillance scheduled of known meeting sites, the FBI said.

* CIA Officer Harold James Nicholson was arrested by the FBI in November 1996 and charged with committing espionage on behalf of Russia. Nicholson was arrested at a Washington airport en route to a clandestine meeting in Europe with his Russian intelligence handlers. When he was arrested, he was carrying rolls of exposed film which contained secret and top secret information. In March 1997, Nicholson pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to 23 years in prison.

* Aldrich H. Ames, a CIA counterintelligence official, and his wife, Rosario, pleaded guilty in 1994 to spying for the Soviet Union in what is considered the most-damaging espionage case in U.S. history. Ames passed information, which included the identities of U.S. agents, to Moscow from 1985 to 1994. He is blamed for the deaths of at least nine U.S. agents in the Soviet Union, and for disclosing U.S. counterintelligence techniques.

* Former CIA officer Edward Lee Howard fled in 1985 as the FBI was investigating him for spying for the Soviet Union. Howard, who is accused of disclosing the identities of CIA agents in Moscow, turned up in the Soviet Union in 1986, where he still lives. He eluded FBI surveillance of his home in Santa Fe, N.M., where he worked for the New Mexico Legislature. The CIA did not tell the FBI that Howard, who had been fired in 1983 after failing a lie-detector test.

* Jonathan Jay Pollard, a civilian Navy intelligence analyst, pleaded guilty in 1986 to spying for Israel. He was sentenced to life in prison. Several unsuccessful attempts have been made to free him since. In 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sought clemency, which was denied and President Clinton left office without acting. The Israeli government had sought to have him either pardoned or be allowed to serve out his sentence in Israel.

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Times staff and wire reports