Retired Colonel Guilty of Spying

A federal jury in Tampa took only two hours Tuesday to find a 74-year-old Florida man guilty of espionage for smuggling thousands of pages of U.S. classified documents to the KGB.

George Trofimoff, the German-born son of Russian immigrants and a retired colonel from the U.S. Army Reserve, could face a life term in prison. According to testimony at his trial, he was one of the Kremlin’s most prized undercover assets during the Cold War, earning a Soviet medal for valor.

With his conviction on a count of conspiracy to commit espionage, the Melbourne, Fla., resident became the highest-ranking member of the American military ever found guilty of spying for a foreign power.

“George Trofimoff wasn’t an accidental spy. He wasn’t casual and he wasn’t a sloppy spy,” Assistant U.S. Atty. Laura Ingersoll said during closing arguments Monday. “In a very real sense, he was the perfect spy.”

From 1968 to 1994, Trofimoff served as chief of an Army interrogation center in Nuremberg, Germany, an installation that was a trove of top-secret briefing papers. He was accused of covertly photographing thousands of documents while in that post and passing the film to contacts in the KGB, the Soviet spy agency. In exchange, he allegedly was paid around $250,000.

Some of the copied documents that made their way to Moscow thanks to Trofimoff, according to federal prosecutors, were American assessments of Soviet battle plans that tipped the Russians to what the West knew and allowed them to make changes.

Trofimoff, who lived in an upscale community for military retirees on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, was arrested last year in Tampa while trying to collect more money that he thought was coming from the KGB.

In his defense, Trofimoff said that he never betrayed U.S. secrets but only claimed to have done so because he thought the grateful Russians would pay him money he desperately needed to cover his big credit-card debts. When he gave the account that he now maintains is hollow braggadocio, Trofimoff believed he was talking to an official of the Russian Embassy. But the man was really Dmitri Droujinsky, an undercover FBI agent.

“If he had asked me, ‘Did you give us the Brooklyn Bridge?’ I would have told him ‘Yes,’ ” Trofimoff testified Monday. At times, his statements made jurors guffaw in disbelief.

During the trial, which lasted nearly a month, federal prosecutors scored a historic first by having a former high-ranking KGB official take the witness stand.

Oleg Kalugin, 61, is now a U.S. resident, but in the thick of the Cold War he was KGB chief of counterespionage and held the rank of major general.

Under oath, Kalugin confirmed that Trofimoff had been a KGB operative and said that he secretly met with him twice: in Austria and Crimea in the 1970s.

Droujinsky also testified about conversations he had with Trofimoff that had been captured on videotape or audio recorders and later were played for jurors.

To ensure that the FBI agent could continue in his undercover role, he came to the U.S. District Court in Tampa wearing a shaggy toupee and thick glasses that made him look like Peter Sellers.

Trofimoff was first arrested by German authorities in 1994 for spying, but those charges were dropped when Germany’s five-year statute of limitations expired. This country has no similar limitations on prosecuting espionage cases, so U.S. officials devised the sting operation with Droujinsky targeting Trofimoff.

Although the U.S.-Soviet superpower rivalry may now seem like ancient history to some, prosecutors said the verdict against Trofimoff should serve as a cautionary tale to any American tempted in the future to commit espionage.

“What this case should do is send a message to those we entrust our nation’s secrets to--that if you sell those secrets, if you spy against the United States, we’ll pull out all the stops to catch you, to bring you to justice and to convict you,” Ingersoll said.

Sentencing was set for Sept. 27.