1985, the Year of the Spy

American newspapers called 1985 the Year of the Spy because of the arrests: in a few months the FBI caught a Navy family selling cipher keys to the KGB, an NSA veteran who had sold the Soviets an undersea intelligence operation, a Navy analyst spying for Israel and a retired CIA translator who had worked for China for three decades^1,6. The phrase undersold the year. Behind the headlines, two men inside the CIA and FBI were handing the KGB the names of nearly every source the United States had in Soviet intelligence².

The arrests

The run began on 20 May 1985, when the FBI arrested John Walker in a Maryland motel after watching him leave classified Navy documents at a roadside drop for the KGB. His son, his brother and his friend Jerry Whitworth were in custody within two weeks (the Walker ring)¹. In July a CIA clerk who had passed agent identities to Ghanaian intelligence was charged after a routine polygraph raised concerns¹.

In November the pace quickened. On 21 November Jonathan Pollard, a civilian analyst for naval intelligence, was arrested outside the Israeli embassy in Washington after being refused asylum there; he later pleaded guilty to conspiring to deliver defense information to Israel and was sentenced to life^1,6. On 22 November the FBI arrested Larry Wu-tai Chin, a retired CIA translator accused of a 33-year career of espionage for China; convicted in February 1986, he killed himself in his cell before sentencing¹. On 25 November it arrested Ronald Pelton, a former NSA communications specialist who had sold the KGB what he knew of a US collection project against the Soviet Union, later identified as the undersea cable tap Ivy Bells^1,6.

A defector, a fugitive

Several of the leads came from Vitaly Yurchenko, a senior KGB officer who walked into the US embassy in Rome in the summer of 1985 and was in CIA hands by early August^1,2. He told the CIA of a former CIA employee, code-named "Robert" in KGB cables, who had sold secrets; the CIA identified him as Edward Lee Howard, fired in 1983 after failing a polygraph, who had been trained for duty in Moscow. On 21 September, two days after an FBI interview, Howard slipped past surveillance at his New Mexico home and fled; he surfaced in Moscow and was granted asylum in 1986^2,1. Yurchenko also pointed to Pelton¹. Then, in November 1985, he walked away from his CIA handlers in Washington and went back to the Soviets, prompting reviews of how the CIA treated defectors^5,1.

The hidden disaster

The arrests were American successes. The losses running in the opposite direction were far larger, and almost no one outside a few offices knew of them.

On 16 April 1985 Aldrich Ames, a CIA counterintelligence officer, entered the Soviet embassy and began selling secrets. On 13 June, according to the Senate's later inquiry, he handed the KGB documents identifying more than ten top CIA and FBI sources reporting on Soviet activities; Ames, who pleaded guilty to espionage in 1994, admitted in court papers that he had named Soviet officers cooperating with the CIA². On 1 October 1985 an anonymous FBI agent, later identified as Robert Hanssen, mailed the KGB the names of three FBI sources, two of whom Ames had already given up (the Hanssen case)⁴.

The roll-up was fast. In May the KGB recalled Oleg Gordievsky, its resident-designate in London and a British agent; in July MI6 smuggled him out across the Finnish border⁷. On 13 June the KGB seized a CIA officer on his way to meet the radar engineer Adolf Tolkachev, whom it had already arrested (the Tolkachev case)⁵. Valeriy Martynov, a KGB officer working for the FBI, was arrested on arrival in Moscow in November, having been sent home as part of Yurchenko's escort; he and Sergey Motorin were executed⁴. GRU General Dmitri Polyakov (TOPHAT), long retired, was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988⁸.

The Senate report counted over 20 operations compromised in this period, fewer than half of which could be blamed on Howard, and called the result "a virtual collapse of the CIA's Soviet operations"².

Why 1985

The cluster was partly a statistical accident. A US counterintelligence summary notes that 1984 had more reported espionage cases than 1985¹, while a Defense Department research center counting Americans known to have spied found that the number peaked in 1985³. What changed was the motive: the new spies, the summary observes, were driven by money rather than ideology¹. Congress responded with the Stilwell Commission on Pentagon security and, in October 1986, a Senate report on the espionage challenge^3,1.

The deeper story took far longer to emerge. Ames was not arrested until 21 February 1994, and Hanssen was not under FBI surveillance until the end of 2000^2,4.

Read next

December 1967 – 20 May 1985 The Walker spy ring For seventeen years US Navy communications specialist John Walker sold cipher keys and secret messages to the KGB, later recruiting a friend, his brother and his son. The FBI arrested him in May 1985. November 1979 – 18 February 2001 The Hanssen case FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for Soviet and Russian intelligence in three bursts from 1979 to 2001 without revealing his name. Caught at a Virginia dead drop in 2001, he was the most damaging spy in FBI history. OPERATION · 1977 January 1977 – 24 September 1986 The Tolkachev case From 1979 to 1985 Soviet radar engineer Adolf Tolkachev photographed secret designs for the CIA in Moscow, handing over hundreds of rolls of film. Betrayed in 1985, he was executed in September 1986. OPERATION · 1961 November 1961 – 15 March 1988 TOPHAT: the Polyakov case From 1961 to 1980 GRU officer Dmitri Polyakov, later a major general, spied for the FBI and CIA. Betrayed by Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames, he was arrested in 1986 and shot in 1988. October 1971 – 1981 Operation Ivy Bells From 1971 US Navy divers working from submarines tapped a Soviet military cable on the floor of the Sea of Okhotsk. Former NSA analyst Ronald Pelton sold the secret to the KGB, and the Soviets removed the tap in 1981. OPERATION · 1981 February 1981 – 23 January 1985 The Farewell Dossier In 1981–82 a disaffected KGB officer, Vladimir Vetrov, gave French counterintelligence thousands of documents on Soviet technology theft. The West expelled scores of Soviet officers and fed Moscow doctored technology.