In September 1960, two U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) cryptologists, William Hamilton Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, defected to the Soviet Union.
They defected together to the Soviet Union in 1960 and, at a Moscow press conference, revealed and denounced various U.S. policies, especially provocative incursions into the air space of other nations and spying on America's own allies.
[3] Classified NSA investigations, on the other hand, determined the pair had "greatly inflated opinions concerning their intellectual attainments and talents" and had defected to satisfy social aspirations.
[1] The House Un-American Activities Committee publicly intimated its interpretation of the relationship between Martin and Mitchell as homosexual and that reading guided the Pentagon's discussion of the defection for decades.
He gained experience as a cryptologist during a tour of duty in the Navy from 1951 to 1954, serving in Japan with the Naval Security Group at Kami Seya.
[6] Mitchell and Martin became disturbed by what they learned of American incursions into foreign airspace and realized that Congress was unaware of those NSA-sponsored flights.
During the conference, the defectors made public for the first time the mission and activities of the NSA in a prepared statement written, they said: "without consulting the Government of the Soviet Union".
They also said: Our main dissatisfaction concerned some of the practices the United States uses in gathering intelligence information ... deliberately violating the airspace of other nations ... intercepting and deciphering the secret communications of its own allies ...Perhaps United States hostility towards Communism arises out of a feeling of insecurity engendered by Communist achievements in science, culture and industry.As we know from our previous experience working at N.S.A., the United States successfully reads the secure communications of more than forty nations, including its own allies.They particularly attacked the views of General Thomas S. Power who had recently told a Congressional committee that the U.S. needed to maintain a nuclear first-strike capability and Senator Barry Goldwater's opposition to banning nuclear tests and negotiating a disarmament treaty.
[7] That charge was promptly picked up by the press and resulted immediately in stories about homosexuals recruiting "other sexual deviates" for jobs in the federal government.
He occasionally sought the help of American visitors in arranging for repatriation, including Donald Duffy, vice president of the Kaiser Foundation, and bandleader Benny Goodman.
Martin eventually left the Soviet Union and died of cancer in Mexico on January 17, 1987, at Tijuana's Hospital Del Mar.
Attorney General William P. Rogers believed that the Soviets had a list of homosexuals to use in their recruiting and blackmail efforts, that Martin and Mitchell were part of "an organized group".
Notes of psychological counseling sessions from the 1940s described Martin as "brilliant but emotionally immature" and offered a diagnosis of "beginning character neurosis with schizoid tendencies" and mentioned he was likely "sadistic".
Mitchell had told the NSA when questioned not long after starting work at the Agency that he had experimented sexually as a teenager with dogs and chickens.
In 1961, an NSA report called them "close friends and somewhat anti-social", "egotistical, arrogant and insecure young men whose place in society was much lower than they believed they deserved", with "greatly inflated opinions concerning their intellectual attainments and talents".
[c] NSA files obtained by journalists at the Seattle Weekly in 2007 cited definitive testimony on the part of women acquaintances who attested to their heterosexuality.
Where Mitchell had told his psychiatrist that he had affairs with both men and women and was not troubled about his sexual identity,[28] the report referred to his "homosexual problems".
[29] The report never identified a rationale for the Mitchell and Martin defections, but focused on the inadequacy of the investigations that granted them security clearances despite evidence of "homosexuality or other sexual abnormality", atheism, and Communist sympathies on the part of one or both of the men.
[30] The report made a series of recommendations with respect to NSA hiring practices and security investigations that were promptly adopted by the Agency.