History Was Blamed on Cold War Defectors’ Homosexuality
But what if they weren’t gay?
By Rick Anderson Wednesday, Jul 18 2007
To some of his detractors, William Hamilton Martin was something
of an amusing figure on the streets of Washington ,
D.C. , in the 1960s, a bookish mathematician
with a crew cut who walked with a Groucho Marx–like waddle. But what others remembered
most was that lean, blue-eyed "Ham" Martin, a University of
Washington graduate and the son of an Ellensburgmeatpacker,
was a meticulous dresser, spoke "slightly effeminately," and may have
had a thing for a Stanford grad named Bernon Mitchell. Furthermore, the belief among some
officials, politicians, and the press was that because Martin and Mitchell
might be homosexual, they did the unthinkable: In the midst of the Cold War,
the two National Security Agency code
breakers defected to Russia
and went to work for the Soviet government.
On June 25, 1960 ,
after four years as trusted employees of America 's
largest spy agency, Martin, then 29, and Mitchell, then 31, flew out of Washington ,
D.C. , with one-way tickets to Mexico
City . From there, they quietly slipped off to Havana and
took a Russian freighter to the Soviet
Union, following a plan that had evolved over a year. The case stunned
politicians and intelligence officials alike. Looking back, some of the
defectors' neighbors and co-workers told investigators that if they'd been more
vigilant about the pair's sexual proclivities, maybe they'd have been more
suspicious of their patriotism.
In the eyes of many Americans, sexual deviants—then the
commonly used term for homosexual men—were potential traitors, a belief that's
been perpetuated in more modern times. A 1991 Pentagon study of paraphilia
(kinky or bizarre sexual behaviors) issued by the Defense Security Service and used
today in military circles counts Martin and Mitchell among a group of
"publicly known homosexuals" who betrayed their country. Political,
counterintelligence, and religious Internet sites currently refer to Martin
"and his gay friend," and a 1997 book,The Homosexual Revolution, informs
readers that the two "were homosexuals who had been permitted access to
classified information."
But according to the NSA's own investigative
files, obtained exclusively by Seattle Weekly, there's one major
problem with the flaming traitor theory: Martin and Mitchell
weren't gay. The formerly classified Pentagon and NSA documents, which
reveal previously unpublished details of the historic spy-agency saga, appear
to clear Martin and Mitchell of the sexual charges that rocked the country 47
years ago this summer and led to landmark NSA policy changes.
"Beyond any doubt," the unnamed author of a
then-secret NSA study
on the defection wrote in 1963, according to the recently released
documents, "no
other event has had, or is likely to have in the future, a greater impact on
the Agency's security program." Screening methods used today at
NSA, with a work force estimated at 30,000, evolved from Internal Security Act
legislation passed in the wake of the pair's defection.
After interviewing more than 450 individuals about the
twosome's character, habits, and sex lives—right down to the skin rash on
Martin's stomach—the NSA, in a 1961 report, could find no conclusive evidence
the two men were gay. "Martin and Mitchell were known to be close friends
and somewhat anti-social, but no one had any knowledge of a homosexual
relationship between them," investigators reported. Both, in fact, had
American girlfriends, and Martin married a Russian woman four months after his
arrival there. Mitchell also wed later.
The recently declassified documents—about 85 pages of
lightly redacted records that include information from the FBI, CIA, and State Department, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request that
took four years to fulfill—reveal that both men, now reported dead, quickly
soured on Soviet life, felt their defection was a mistake, and tried repeatedly
to return to the U.S. Mitchell never made it, having been buried
in St. Petersburg, Russia, in November 2001 at the age
of 72. But Martin, the Ellensburg defector, returned to American soil in
1987—literally. A diplomatic cable from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico
that year states: "William H. Martin died of cancer at Hospital
Del Mar in Tijuana on
January 17, 1987 ." He
was three months short of his 56th birthday. "Burial," the cable
noted, "took place in the United States ."
No location or details were provided.
Revelations of a witch-hunt gone astray don't surprise
former Washington National Guard Col. Grethe Cammermeyer, a lesbian and the military's
highest-ranking officer to be discharged because of sexual orientation.
"[It is] my understanding that there had never been a homosexual blackmail
[in which silence was] traded for state secrets," she says.
Author and historian David K. Johnson, an expert on the Cold War history
of gays in the government, agrees with Cammermeyer, adding that desertion to Russia
"was literally unthinkable for most American officials. So to make sense
of the defection, they turned to the alleged sexual perversion. That was
already associated in the popular imagination with subversion and
communism." Among the gay bashers was then–FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who, after his death,
was rumored to have been an avid cross-dresser.
James Bamford, an expert on the NSA and author of the
best-selling agency exposé The Puzzle Palace, was surprised to hear that
old lefty defector Martin was interred in the country he betrayed. That's
"new and very interesting," he observed. Bamford, who labeled the
defection the worst internal scandal in NSA history, says lack of proof the two
were gay confirms his belief the public was misled about Martin and Mitchell.
"I think the NSA was looking for any straw to grasp when the defections
occurred," he says, "and homosexuality was the perfect excuse."
Growing up among conservative Central
Washington 's fields of grain, Martin seemed an unlikely traitor.
His father, John, was then president of the Ellensburg Chamber of Commerce, and
young Martin was a gifted student at Ellensburg High, where he finished school
in two years. He then studied at Central Washington College of Education (now Central
Washington University )
and, in 1947, earned a degree in mathematics at the University
of Washington in Seattle .
Martin was raised among sunburned farm kids who believed in
the flag and didn't question their government. World War II and the atomic
bomb, made from plutonium produced atHanford 100
miles southeast, were major influences on their 1940s environment. Like a lot
of landlocked youth across the mountains from Seattle ,
Martin longed to join the Navy and serve his country, as he later did.
Assigned to a post in Japan with
the Naval Security Group from 1951 to 1954,
he met Mitchell, a budding weight lifter, pistol enthusiast, and pianist born
in San Francisco , the NSA notes in
its files. (The agency meticulously recorded that he hated lettuce but liked
raw chicken.) After their Navy service, Martin and Mitchell kept in touch when
both returned to college, and met again after they were recruited by the NSA.
Both pursued further studies in science and mathematics.
Martin, a serious chess player who collected Japanese sword
handles, was seen by some as introverted and troubled. His file includes
details of sessions at the University of Washington Counseling Center in the
late 1940s, where he sought assistance for "certain personality
aberrations."
"[Tests] disclosed that Martin was a brilliant but
emotionally immature individual who did not respect his father, who pitied his
younger brother and who expressed his antipathy toward his mother," reads
the file. "Martin's condition was diagnosed as a beginning character
neurosis with schizoid tendencies. It was also believed that Martin was
sadistic." Martin reportedly had two brothers, but no surviving family
members could be reached for this story.
Their years at the National Security Agency,the Pentagon's now 55-year-old semiautonomous
espionage branch, were seemingly uneventful, the files indicate. Using their
exceptional calculation and pattern-recognition skills, Martin and Mitchell
helped decipher and possibly encode secret communiqués at the then-young
agency. Today, the NSA's top-secret network of supercomputers, headquartered
at Fort Meade, Md., and its global listening
posts—including an international intercept station hidden among the dunes at
the Yakima Army Firing Range and a vast antenna farm on a mesa above Brewster
inOkanogan County—scan the daily gusher of world
communications. Experts pore over the missives of friendly and enemy nations
alike, utilizing an intelligence-gathering discipline known as Signals Intelligence,
or SIGINT, that allows them to electronically collect, process, and analyze
content. Esoteric as it is, the system traps the everyday conversations of U.S.
citizens as well. Congress recently subpoenaed the Bush White House to determine if the administration
ordered the illegal use of SIGINT to eavesdrop on those private conversations
after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
On Aug. 1, 1960 ,
the Pentagon guardedly announced that Martin and Mitchell had failed to return
from a summer vacation together, leading to anxious speculation they'd
defected. Four days later, officials stated that there was "the
likelihood" that Martin and Mitchell "have gone behind the Iron
Curtain." Supposedly privy to some of America 's
most sensitive secrets, including knowledge of broken foreign military and
diplomatic codes, the duo appeared to have handed Soviet Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev an
edge in the two superpowers' psychological Cold War and arms race.
A little more than a month later, Martin and Mitchell
confirmed their betrayal at an elaborate Sept. 6 press conference in Moscow,
where they had been granted asylum and became instant Soviet citizens. Nattily
clad in shirt and tie before 200 reporters at the theater-style House of
Journalists, Mitchell announced that he and Martin were disgusted with the
deceptive nature of a supposed democracy. The pair also felt they were suited
for Soviet life, where they would be "better accepted socially."
A banner New York Times headline the next
day noted that President Dwight D. Eisenhower "Calls
Pair Traitorous." Furthermore, said Ike, they were
"self-confessed" traitors. The reliably blunt former President Harry Truman suggested they be shot.
John F. Kennedy, who would go on to defeat Vice President Richard Nixon for the White House
that year, coincidentally was campaigning in Seattle
that day. He didn't refer directly to local defector Martin, but said, "I
cannot believe that there is any person in this state or nation who would not
like to see the arms race ended....[Yet] we can prepare for peace only by
preparing for war." Martin's bewildered father, John, told reporters that
as far as he knew, his son had no interest in politics. Ham must be in Moscow
"under duress," the elder Martin theorized. In California ,
Mitchell's father, Emery, a Eureka
attorney and community leader, expressed similar sentiments.
Besides the intelligence breach, the defection would mark a
historical turning point in employment protocol at Fort
Meade . The NSA immediately began
searching for other sexual deviants in its ranks, eventually purging 26
employees suspected of being security risks because of their alleged
"perversions." The agency also revamped employment-screening and
in-house security practices, among other things permanently allowing
investigators to access confidential employee polygraph tests.
Department of Defense officials at
first publicly denied having allowed the two men to slip through their trusty
screening process and obtain high-level security clearances. Upon further
review, officials discovered that while Mitchell had been granted clearance
after originally refusing to answer intake queries about his sex life, he
eventually admitted to sexually experimenting with chickens and dogs as a
teenager.
A 1962 report on the defection, issued by the
subversive-hunting House Un-American Activities
Committee, went further: Besides being agnostic and having associated with
Communists, Martin was "sexually abnormal; in fact, a masochist,"
while Mitchell, who had once posed for nude color slides perched on a
velvet-covered stool, had supposedly been outed by his psychiatrist. The HUAC
report claimed the doctor secretly testified "to the effect" that Mitchell
had admitted he "has had homosexual problems."
In his book on the NSA, author Bamford concludes that the
HUAC report "seemed to indicate the primary reason for the defection was
homosexuality. Never once did the committee bother to look into what might have
been the deeper reasons for the defection, the political or ideological
motivations."
At the Moscow press
conference, Martin and Mitchell tried to explain their motives, citing U.S.
"policies dangerous to world peace," as Mitchell put it. He pointed
to a 1960 speech by the U.S. Strategic Air Command chief, Gen. Thomas Power, who—on a topic that echoes today in
America—spoke of the "tremendous advantages that accrue to the man who
starts a war" and the necessity of having first-strike nuclear
capabilities.
"Gen. Powers' statement involves the dangerous
presumption," Mitchell told his Soviet audience, "that the United
States owns the world." He called the
first-strike policy suicidal and accused the U.S.
of deliberately violating the airspace of other nations before "lying
about such violations in a manner intended to mislead public opinion."
Only months earlier—May Day 1960—international tensions had
escalated with the downing of an American U-2 spy plane over Russia .
Pilot Francis Gary Powers, who invaded Soviet airspace on a
surveillance flight, was captured, tried, and imprisoned (then swapped in a
prisoner exchange for KGB colonel and spy Rudolf
Abel 21 months later). Eisenhower refused to apologize, and, under
Kennedy, the Cold War relentlessly grew into a potential nuclear war with the
1962 Cuban Missile Crisis—an apocalypse ultimately aborted through back-channel
talks between the Kennedy and Khrushchev administrations.
Still unknown are what sort of details Martin and Mitchell
provided to the Russians. But their public statements—describing reconnaissance
flights both countries likely knew about, and giving general details of how NSA
intercepts airborne communications worldwide—weren't especially damaging, some
press observers noted. The defectors evidently did not publicly disclose any
high-level secrets and, by some accounts, had never worked inside the NSA's
most sensitive intelligence loop anyway, with U.S.
officials alternately describing them as "junior mathematicians" and
"clerks." (Even today, so little is known about the mysterious NSA
that it is referred to jokingly as No Such Agency.)
Either way, Martin and Mitchell seemed naive about the
consequences of their choice and the harm they could bring to America .
They could have made their statement in the U.S. ,
albeit not quite as dramatically, without betraying their country. "What
originally got the two angry at NSA and the U.S. government were the spy
flights near and over Soviet territory," says author Bamford, whose latest
book, A Pretext for War, is about the government's manipulation of
intelligence to justify invading Iraq."They
did try to go through the proper procedure originally, by telling a congressman
about it. But when nothing was done, they made their decision to defect."
(The Congressman, Rep.
Wayne Haysof Ohio , later
departed Congress after scandalously hiring his mistress, Elizabeth Ray, as a secretary, even though she
couldn't type.)
Speaking out in the U.S.
likely would have gotten Martin and Mitchell fired and left them facing charges
for revealing secrets, which could have entailed federal prison time. In Moscow ,
laying out their reasons for defecting, Mitchell indicated that he and Martin
weighed the alternatives of Russian freedom vs. American persecution. They
preferred the former, said Mitchell: In the U.S., people with unpopular
political convictions "are frequently hailed before investigating committees,
harassed, fined, imprisoned, and denied jobs" (something likewise
possible, of course, in the gulag-controlled U.S.S.R.).
Mitchell likely was referring in part to the Red Scare bred
by Sen. Joe McCarthy, who recklessly questioned the
loyalty of government workers and others he suspected were Communists or
sympathizers during the 1950s. But there was a kind of civil service
McCarthyism going on as well, in which real or suspected gay government workers
were perceived as national security risks and often fired. Johnson, author of
the 2004 book The Lavender Scare, says that once the Red Scare faded in
the 1950s, the Martin and Mitchell defection "breathed new life into the
Lavender Scare." The Los Angeles Times reported the two might be
part of a ring of homosexuals who "recruit other sex deviates for federal
jobs." Hearst papers (including the P-I) referred to "the two
defecting blackmailed homosexual specialists" as a "love team."
The lavender stage had already been set by Jack
Lait and Lee Mortimer in their 1951
exposé, Washington Confidential. That best seller called D.C. "a
garden of pansies" with 6,000 homosexuals on the government payroll,
stating that "if you're wondering where your wandering semi-boy is
tonight, he's probably in Washington ."
The Pentagon and HUAC (which disbanded in 1975) effectively
wrote off Martin and Mitchell as aberrant turncoats, too limp-wristed to wave a
flag. "The Martin and Mitchell case," says Johnson,
"demonstrates that when it comes to gay people and public policy, fantasy
has historically played a stronger role than the facts. There was no rational
basis for the argument that gay people posed a threat to national security in
the 1950s, just as there is no rational basis for our exclusion from the
military today.It's pure animus and unthinking stereotyping that drove the
Martin case and continues to drive public policy today."
According to the newly obtained Pentagon and NSA
documents, Martin and Mitchell defected for ideological reasons. Acquaintances
said Martin and Mitchell often spoke of their disenchantment with government
policies, and hinted at someday deserting. They also vacationed in Cuba
and Mexico in
1959, something the NSA never knew about. They may have tried to flee then, but
the Russians initially "did not show too much interest in them,"
sources told the NSA.
That they held such beliefs seems to have surprised the NSA,
which wasn't keeping a close watch on the pair. Martin's and Mitchell's
families, who spoke little to reporters, cooperated with the ensuing
investigation. Martin's family said it was "absolutely impossible"
that Ham went willingly to the Soviet Union and that
their parting statement had to be a forgery. (Martin and Mitchell left a hard
copy of the statement they read aloud in a safe deposit box in Maryland.)
Similarly, the declassified files state, "The Mitchell family advised that
their son had mentioned psychiatric treatment; that all through his life he has
been influenced by others...[he always] tagged along."
In a way, the NSA agreed. "The most plausible
explanations for the defection attributed it to personal abnormalities,"
the agency's documents state. The multiagency U.S.
probe "revealed that the two were egotistical, arrogant and insecure young
men whose place in society was much lower than they believed they deserved.
Both had greatly inflated opinions concerning their intellectual attainments
and talents, and both reportedly expressed bitter resentment that they had not
yet received the recognition they were sure they deserved as up-and-coming
young scientists."
As for their alleged homosexuality, the files make clear
that the two men were enamored by both American and Russian women.
"Personal associates also deny any knowledge of homosexuality on the part
of Martin and Mitchell and state that both men engaged in social and sexual
activity with women," the NSA reports. "One [U.S. ]
female associate of Mitchell acknowledges frequent and normal sexual activity
with him during the entire period of their acquaintance." Some American
friends and neighbors thought they were "odd young men who kept to
themselves."
But then they apparently did have personal secrets to
protect, NSA investigators found. One of Martin's regular companions was a Baltimore
stripper known as Lady Zorro; she told investigators she had as many as 40
"dates" with the mathematician, who always paid in large amounts of
cash.
A source described Martin as "totally devoted to his
all-controlling sadomasochism," and an Ellensburg man said Martin had
"perverted sexual relations with Japanese females [while in the Navy] and
with women in the State of Washington ."
The acts apparently involved watching, or joining in with, two women having sex.
After Martin's arrival in Russia ,
the NSA reported, he "denied emphatically that either he or Mitchell were
homosexuals. He said he had some sex problems, but that he was certainly not a
homosexual." His "sex problems," it appeared, always involved
women.
As for their love of communism, once they got a whiff of
Russian life in the hardscrabble Red society of the 1960s, the duo quickly
longed for home. Martin asked about the possibility of returning as early as
1961, records show.
The NSA papers, which include intelligence reports on their
life in Russia
as late as 1975, indicate both men tried to arrange for their return to the
States, on the condition that they wouldn't be imprisoned. They also attempted
to meet with their families, possibly in Mexico
or Canada , but
reunions apparently were never held. In the following years, Martin, Mitchell,
and their families asked U.S.
officials if the two would face trial if they returned voluntarily. Officials
would say only that no charges had been filed, and suggested they might be
allowed back. The defectors suspected this was a trick to lure them to the
States, where, if charged with treason, they'd face the death penalty.
In Russia ,
Martin and Mitchell worked and studied in Leningrad
and, for at least the first year, were intensely debriefed by the Soviet
government—with the KGB always nearby. Each man initially earned, in equivalent
U.S. dollars, about $500 a month from the government. Martin, who was fluent in
Russian, studied at Leningrad University, and used the name Vladimir Sokolodsky.
"Both married Soviet citizens," says one
government report, "but Martin divorced his wife [Inessa] in about July
1963 after moving to Moscow ."
Meanwhile, Mitchell married a woman named Galina, dean of the piano faculty at
Leningrad Conservatory. Reportedly, neither fathered any children.
The documents also reveal that Martin and Mitchell
repeatedly introduced themselves to visiting Americans, seeking their help to
return to their native soil. Among the visitors wasBernard Oliver, chief researcher at Hewlett-Packard. Mitchell reportedly told
Oliver that he and Martin helped the Soviets make their code system less
susceptible to U.S.
cracking, but were "of no help to the U.S.S.R. in breaking U.S.
codes." Martin, meanwhile, showed up at a restaurant where Donald Duffy, vice president of the Kaiser Foundation, was having dinner. Martin told
Duffy that he wasn't "a homosexual or a spy" and was doing laser beam
research.
Martin also sought out touring American bandleader Benny Goodman for a chat in Leningrad ,
saying he needed help getting a lawyer to leave Russia .
Nothing apparently came of the encounters. (Mike
Roetto, a Virginia-based blogger who works in the security field, recently
obtained State Department documents reflecting efforts the two defectors
undertook to regain their citizenship. Roetto says he wanted to study the
"dark corner" of risk created in this case, assessing whether the
re-entry process contained loopholes that could be exploited today. Based on
the documents posted at roetto.org/blog,
which include Martin's death notice from Mexico ,
there's no indication either defector was repatriated. But in at least one
message, the State Department advised the U.S. Embassy in Moscow that it should
"mail to Martin the forms to apply for registration as a U.S.
citizen by mail.")
In a newspaper interview in Russia ,
Martin called his defection "foolhardy," but said he wasn't ashamed.
He told another person the Russians actually didn't trust him, "for he is
under constant surveillance by them and given work only of the lowest order of
priority." His friend Mitchell, who spoke little Russian, had become
morose and a heavy drinker, some sources said, willing to divorce his wife and
do whatever it took to get out of the country. But by all accounts, he remained
in Russia even
after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, dying there 10
years later.
Meanwhile, by 1975, "Martin was described by one source
as being 'totally on the skids,' an incurable alcoholic, and surrounded by
degenerates and devoted to the practice of sexual perversions," according
to reports. Once a fit 5 foot 11 and 175 pounds, Martin had become a
"sweaty...seedy" man of over 200 pounds. Within two years, he'd get
his wish to leave Russia
(possibly via an Australian passport he'd applied for), apparently spending his
final days just south of the U.S.
border, and eternity deep within American soil.
In the 1963 NSA study, a summary of the "secret
findings" reveals that government investigators found "some of the
worst fears aroused by the case were groundless [and] established no clear
motive for the defection." The Russians hadn't enticed the duo, and the
two were not part of any foreign espionage effort. The study concludes that
"the accumulated evidence indicated that the defection was an impulsive,
self-generated act, conceived and initiated without outside prompting or
assistance."
Ultimately, the queerest things about Martin and Mitchell
were their political, not sexual, acts. "Were they living today,"
quips author Bamford, "[they] would probably defect all over again."
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