Robert Lamphere, 83; Soviet Espionage Specialist for FBI

Robert J. Lamphere, an FBI counterintelligence specialist who supervised many of the most notorious postwar Soviet espionage cases, including the atomic spy case that led to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, has died. He was 83.

Lamphere, a resident of Green Valley, Ariz., and Hayden, Idaho, died of prostate cancer Jan. 7 in a hospital in Tucson.

The key to one of the United States’ greatest Cold War counterintelligence coups was the top-secret breaking of the Soviet wartime code, which led to deciphering intercepted messages that had been sent by the Soviet consulate in New York and its embassy in Washington to Moscow between 1944 and 1945.

Information gleaned from those deciphered messages and the FBI investigations presided over by Lamphere led to unmasking not only the Rosenberg spy ring but many other Soviet spies.

But cracking the Soviet wartime code was a long, tedious process, and little progress had been made when Lamphere was transferred from the New York field office to the Soviet espionage section at FBI headquarters in Washington in 1947.

The several pages of partly decoded Soviet messages he found in the section’s safe were mostly blank, containing deciphered words and code names that were virtually meaningless.

But Lamphere was impressed that cryptanalysts in the Army Security Agency had managed to make even a few partial breaks in the supposedly impregnable Soviet code, and he proposed offering the FBI’s assistance in providing information that might help them further crack the complicated numerical code system.

“The KGB messages were to change my life,” Lamphere wrote in his 1986 book, “The FBI-KGB War: A Special Agent’s Story” (Random House). “More important, they were to affect the course of history: In the coming years, their revelations would lead directly to decisive actions that the FBI took against KGB operations in the United States.”

Born Feb. 14, 1918, in the Coeur d’Alene mining district of Idaho, Lamphere grew up in Mullan, Idaho, where his father leased the rights to mine underground ore deposits. After attending the University of Idaho and its law school, Lamphere completed his degree at the National Law School in Washington, D.C.

Attracted both by the FBI’s elite “crime-busting” image and “the idea of being among the very best,” Lamphere joined the FBI after law school in 1941.

After seven months working in the FBI field office in Birmingham, Ala., he was transferred to the FBI’s New York City office, where in 31/2 years he made more than 400 arrests, mostly involving Selective Service Act violations.

Then he was transferred to FBI headquarters in Washington.

In late 1947, he met for the first time with Meredith Knox Gardner, the brilliant Army Security Agency cryptanalyst and linguist who was working on deciphering the Soviet wartime code. Gardner’s painstaking work was aided by the charred remnants of a Soviet code book found on a battlefield in Finland in 1944, as well as the intercepted coded Soviet intelligence messages.

Lamphere offered to provide Gardner with information that the FBI might have or be able to obtain on a particular subject being discussed in one of the deciphered message fragments. As a result of information supplied by the FBI, Gardner began making slow but steady progress in breaking the code.

A major breakthrough came when Gardner asked Lamphere if he could obtain the plain text of information that had been sent to the Soviet Union in ciphered form in 1944.

It turned out that a mass of material in Russian had been photographed by FBI agents during an investigation into Soviet operations in New York in 1944.

“The material I had delivered [to Gardner] was of great assistance to him as he worked to make his own, correct KGB codebook,” Lamphere wrote.

“I remember well his slight smiles of pleasure when in his work on the messages, he would stop for a moment, reach for his own version of that KGB codebook, and hand-print a word in Russian next to one of the [coded] number-groups.”

Each week from the moment of their breakthrough, Lamphere wrote, he would receive additional deciphered messages and new fragments of messages that had earlier been partly deciphered.

“As the messages became readable, I could set in motion investigations based on what they said.” At times, Lamphere wrote, he had agents in a dozen cities looking into a dozen different cases.

But it wasn’t until September 1949 that the real pay-off began.

That month, President Truman announced that the Russians had exploded an atomic device in August, thus ending the U.S. nuclear monopoly and prompting members of the intelligence community to wonder if the Russians’ speed in developing their own bomb had been aided by crucial research information stolen from the United States.

While examining a newly deciphered 1944 Soviet message before Truman’s announcement, Lamphere discovered data and theories that appeared to have come directly from inside the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, N.M.

Two days later, the FBI determined that the author of the paper summarized in the Soviet message was Klaus Fuchs, one of the top British scientists on the Manhattan Project.

During interrogation by British authorities, Fuchs admitted that he had spied for the Russians. Later, when Lamphere showed him photos of an FBI suspect, Fuchs identified Harry Gold, a Philadelphia chemist, as having been his contact man. Gold then led the FBI to David Greenglass, a U.S. Army machinist who had worked at Los Alamos, and Greenglass named his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, as leader of the spy ring.

Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, were arrested and accused of passing secret atomic-bomb information to the Soviet Union. The couple pleaded innocent, but in 1951, a jury found them guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage. The Rosenbergs were executed in 1953, the first U.S. civilians ever put to death for wartime spying.

At a 1996 conference on the secret code-breaking operation (dubbed the Venona Project) at the National War College in Washington, Lamphere said that he and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover opposed executing Ethel Rosenberg. Although the evidence supported her guilt, Lamphere said, she was not as deeply involved in spying as was her husband, and she also was the mother of two small children. But, he said, their recommendation was overruled by President Eisenhower.

After leaving the FBI in 1955, Lamphere worked at the Veterans Administration, where he rose to the rank of deputy administrator within five years. From 1961 to 1981, he was an executive with John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co.

He is survived by his wife, Martha.