Martin and Mitchell defection

William Hamilton Martin (May 27, 1931 – January 17, 1987) was born in Columbus, Georgia. His family soon moved to Washington state where his father was president of the Ellensburg Chamber of Commerce. He graduated from Ellensburg High School after two years. After studies at Central Washington College of Education (now Central Washington University), he earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1947. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served from 1951 to 1954, working as a cryptologist with the Naval Security Group in Japan. As hobbies, Martin played chess and collected Japanese sword handles (tsuka).[4]

Bernon F. Mitchell (March 11, 1929 – November 12, 2001) was born and raised in Eureka, California, and enlisted in the US Navy after one year of college. 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. He stayed on in Japan for another year, working for the Army Security Agency. Following his Navy service, in 1957 he earned a bachelor's degree in statistics at Stanford University.[5]

Martin and Mitchell became friends during their Navy service at the Naval communications intercept facility at Kami Seya, Japan. They kept in touch as each returned to school after their Navy service and encountered one another again when each was recruited into the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1957.

Their years at the NSA were uneventful. Martin gained enough recognition that he was twice awarded scholarships for study toward a master's degree.[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. In February 1959, in violation of NSA rules, they tried to report what they knew to a Congressman, Ohio Democrat Wayne Hays, who had expressed frustration with the information he was receiving from the NSA.[7][8][9][lower-alpha 1] In December 1959, the pair visited Cuba, without notifying their superiors as required by NSA procedures.[10]

On June 25, 1960, Mitchell and Martin left the U.S. for Mexico. They traveled from there to Havana and then sailed on a Russian freighter to the Soviet Union. On August 5, the Pentagon announced that they had not returned from vacation and said: "there is a likelihood that they have gone behind the Iron Curtain."[11] On September 6, 1960, they appeared at a joint news conference at the House of Journalists in Moscow and announced they had requested asylum and Soviet citizenship.

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". It said that: "the United States Government is as unscrupulous as it has accused the Soviet Government of being". 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. By contrast, they said: "we would attempt to crawl to the moon if we thought it would lessen the threat of an atomic war." The U.S. had recently admitted sending reconnaissance flights over foreign countries in recent years, but Martin and Mitchell said they knew from their Navy service that such flights had occurred as early as 1952–1954. They detailed a U.S. C-130 flight over Soviet Armenia that the Soviets brought down. They contended that it was designed to gain an understanding of Soviet defenses, and that it therefore represented an American interest in attacking the Soviets rather than defending against them. They also complained of restrictions on freedom in the U.S., such as government confiscation of mail, particularly the freedom of those who are "not theists" or "whose political convictions are unpopular".[12][13] In an interview with the Soviet news agency Tass in December 1960, they expressed their belief that American espionage against Russia, U.S. allies, and neutral nations would continue unchanged despite the inauguration of a new American president in January 1961.[14]

In response, the American government called Mitchell and Martin's charges "completely false". The Department of Defense called them "turncoats" and "tools of Soviet propaganda", "one mentally sick and both obviously confused". It also characterized their positions at the NSA as "junior mathematicians".

According to a later government report, Martin—who was fluent in Russian—studied at Leningrad University (now Saint Petersburg State University), and used the name Vladimir Sokolodsky. He married a Soviet citizen whom he divorced in 1963. He later told a Russian newspaper that his defection had been "foolhardy". He also expressed disappointment that the Russians did not trust him with important work. 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. On another occasion he told an American that before defecting he had believed the vision of Russia presented by propaganda publications like USSR and Soviet Life. By 1975, a source told the U.S. government Martin was "totally on the skids." In 1979, he inquired at the American consulate about repatriation. As a result, his case was examined and he was stripped of his American citizenship. He was next denied permission to immigrate to the U.S. and then denied a tourist visa. Martin eventually left the Soviet Union and died of cancer in Mexico on January 17, 1987, at Tijuana's Hospital Del Mar. He was buried in the U.S.[1][19][lower-alpha 2]

Less is known of Mitchell. Having renounced his U.S. citizenship, he remained in the Soviet Union. He married Galina Vladimirovna Yakovleva, a member of the piano department faculty at the Leningrad Conservatory.[21] He became an alcoholic and regretted his decision to defect.[22] Mitchell died of a heart attack in November 2001, and was buried in St. Petersburg.[1]

The defections had another life inside the U.S. intelligence community. At a meeting of the National Security Council in October 1960, officials considered a response to the Martin-Mitchell affair. 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". Several at the meeting thought polygraph tests would help prevent the hiring of homosexuals. President Eisenhower himself wanted a central authority to coordinate all government lists of homosexuals.[3]

In order to prevent another occurrence, the NSA needed to understand what motivated the defectors. Their initial investigation turned up little of interest. 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.[1][23] The immediate NSA response focused on sexual issues. In July 1961 the Agency announced that it had purged 26 employees it identified as "sexual deviates" though it added the qualification that "not all were homosexuals".[24]

Yet a series of NSA investigations gave little credit to the role of sexuality in Mitchell and Martin's defection. 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". In 1963, another NSA report found "no clear motive", that they had not been recruited by foreigners, and termed the defection "impulsive".[lower-alpha 3] 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. The only perversions recorded were Martin's "all-controlling sadomasochism". He had occasionally watched women having sex or had sex himself with multiple female partners.[1]

In 1962, Congressman Walters' House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) concluded its 13-month investigation and issued a report on the defections. Where Mitchell had told his psychiatrist that he had affairs with both men and women and was not troubled about his sexual identity,[26] the report referred to his "homosexual problems".[27] 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.[28] The report made a series of recommendations with respect to NSA hiring practices and security investigations that were promptly adopted by the Agency.[29]

Later government analyses went beyond the characterizations in the HUAC account, unaware of the NSA's unpublished analysis. Despite the contrary evidence, a 1991 study by the Pentagon's Defense Security Service—still in use in 2007—called Martin and Mitchell "publicly known homosexuals".[1]

• Project HOMERUN
• Lavender scare
• Perry Fellwock

• Barrett, David M. (2009). "Secrecy, Security, and Sex: The NSA, Congress, and the Martin–Mitchell Defections". International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence. 22 (4): 699–729. doi:10.1080/08850600903143320. S2CID 154112700.
• Obituary, Eureka Times-Standard, November 2001