Epstein Secrets

cure debriefing room, he said that he had information that Russia would find interesting, but he wanted money in return. What interested me about the Pelton case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton, even though he was no longer working at the NSA and no longer had access to @ the NSA. In addi

urse grab them.” The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald Pelton, the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979. Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought to get money from the

198 | HOW AMERICA LOST ITS SECRETS of the communications of its adversaries. Even though the Cold War had been declared over after the collapse of the Soviet Union a quar- ter of a century earlier, the age-old enterprise of espionage did not end with it. Russia and China still sought to blunt the edge that the N

urse grab them.” The final recruitment I asked Cherkashin about was that of Ronald Pelton, the civilian employee of the NSA who had retired in 1979. Pelton had left the NSA without taking any classified documents with him. After retiring, he had financial difficulties, and he sought to get money from the

return. What interested me about the Pelton case was that Cherkashin proceeded to recruit Pelton even though he was no longer working at the NSA, and Pelton no longer had access to the NSA. In addition, since the FBI had 24 hour surveillance on the embassy, Pelton had almost certainly been photographed en

re he leaked information that exposed CIA operations. Although Agee insisted he was a whistle-blower, and he adamantly denied offering any secrets to the Soviet Union, the KGB viewed him as a conventional spy. According to Oleg Kalugin, the top Soviet counterintelligence officer in the KGB in Moscow, who defected t

ously tapped into Soviet undersea cables in the Sea of Okhotsk, which connected a to the Soviet Pacific Fleet's mainland headquarters at Vladivostok. Pelton received another $30,000 from the KGB. “Did the information in his head proved valuable?” I asked. “As long as the NSA didn’t know the tap was comp

he residence of the Soviet ambassador to Austria. A KGB’s electronic communications expert, Anatoly Slavnov, was then sent to Vienna to supervise the Pelton debriefings. The debriefing sessions, which went on for 15 days, were from 8 AM to 6 PM. In them, Pelton managed to recall Project A, a joint NSA-CIA

. 209-240 4. “I don’t know him...”—Author’s interview with Andrei Lugovoi 5. “It was a rare...”— The vast majority of the 15 Americans defectors to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, including Joel Barr, Morris and Lona Cohen, Victor Hamilton, Edward Lee Howard, George Koval, Bernon Mitchell, William Martin, Isaia

4 “There's definitely a deep state”: Vanden Heuvel and Cohen, “Snowden Speaks.” 255 according to Cherkashin: Cherkashin, interview with author. 258 Pelton had left the NSA: George E. Curry, “Ex-intelligence Expert Guilty of Espionage,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1986. CHAPTER 26 The Handler 261 “As for

memorandum noted: Former NSA executive who requested anonymity, interview with author. @ CHAPTER 21 The Russians Are Coming @ 217 “The collapse of the Soviet Union”: Nick Allen, “Soviet Break-Up Was Geopo- litical Disaster, Says Putin,” Telegraph, April 26, 2005. 217 Russian units had managed: Entous, Barnes, a