Traitors' Day in Moscow

In the California seacoast town of Eureka, friends knew Bernon F. Mitchell as an average kind of kid--not too much of an athlete, but fun at parties and an enthusiastic skindiver. Later, at Stanford University, he had a lot of trouble with languages, so he switched courses and became a statistician. Up north, in Ellensburg, Wash., William Martin was the same sort of fellow. He was a good chess player and a mean hand at the piano, and he made a hobby of hypnotism. At the University of Washington he worked hard at his studies, was a topnotch math and science student. When the two young bachelors met during Navy duty in Japan, they became fast friends. When they both signed up to work for the super-secret National Security Agency in Washington three years ago, they seemed ready and willing to settle down to a life of official, patriotic anonymity.

Last week, some 5,000 miles east of anonymity, Mitchell. 31, and Martin, 29, sat in the splash of TV lights in the vast, gilded theater of the House of Journalists in Moscow. Newsmen from the Commu nist and non-Communist world had been summoned to a special press conference to hear them. While the Communists smiled and applauded and Westerners in the audience felt sick at heart, the two renounced their U.S. citizenship, retailed what they knew or suspected about secret U.S. intelligence activities, and pushed the current Soviet propaganda line that the U.S. is risking the peace of the world by persistent espionage. They also demonstrated beyond a doubt that there are serious flaws in U.S. security procedures.

Desirable Mates. First Mitchell and Martin read from a photostat of a statement that they had left behind in a Laurel, Md. safe-deposit box--a maneuver designed to prove that they had made up their minds well out of reach of Russian brainwashing. They had "sought citizenship in the Soviet Union." said the two, because they had learned that the U.S. lies, because its secret agents spy on both hostile and friendly powers, because its international operatives manipulate money and military supplies in an effort to overthrow unfriendly governments.

U.S. policy, they said, was a buildup for preventive war, which would leave its victors, at best, "emperors over the graveyard of civilization." Moreover, said the two bachelors, "the talents of women are encouraged and utilized to a much greater extent in the Soviet Union than in the U.S. We feel that this enriches Soviet society and makes Soviet women more desirable as mates."

"Prefer to Crawl." In a second, long, made-in-Moscow statement, they attacked the "Eisenhower-Nixon Adminis tration," accused the U.S. of spying on its allies and deliberately violating the airspace of other nations. They spilled all they apparently knew about the code-cracking and cryptographic activities of the National Security Agency. They highlighted the whole performance by quoting Arizona's Red-hating Senator Barry Goldwater's warning that "there are among us those who would prefer to crawl to Moscow on their bellies rather than face the possibility of an atomic war." Said Mitchell-Martin: "We do not hesitate to include ourselves in the company mentioned by Senator Goldwater."

For all the embarrassment that it caused the U.S., the Moscow sideshow was not unexpected. Last July, when Martin and Mitchell did not come back from a sum mer vacation, NSA men broke into Mitchell's home in Laurel, Md. They found the place a shambles, and they were par ticularly intrigued by a set of safe-deposit keys. Maryland State Police got a court order to open Mitchell's safe-deposit box in the State Bank of Laurel, and there, indeed, was the typewritten defection statement.

Belatedly, just about every security agency in Washington--both military and civilian--began working back over the Mitchell-Martin records and their own personnel clearance policies. NSA farms out the major part of its security checks to military intelligence agencies, and when the two men first came to work, neither the Office of Naval Intelligence nor the Air Force's Office of Special Investigations found a trace of trouble on their records.

The FBI discovered that last winter the two buddies made a trip to Mexico and took the trouble to hide their travels from their superiors. Upon re-examining the record of a routine lie-detector test, the FBI found signs that Mitchell was something less than emotionally robust. Agents also discovered that he had been consult ing a private psychiatrist, presumably out of concern for homosexual tendencies.

Shocking Breach. Had any of this information turned up in time, NSA might have checked more closely on its men. But there had been an even more obvious signal for caution. When a U.S.A.F. C-130 plane was shot down near Soviet Armenia in 1958, Martin and Mitchell were convinced that the plane and its crew were involved in espionage, were offended with the U.S. claim that the plane had been attacked in innocent flight. They took their suspicions to Ohio Congressman Wayne Hays, who had spoken out against the secrecy surrounding the C-130 flight. A cursory glance at some plastic-covered identification cards convinced Hays that the men worked for the CIA. He wrote their names down on the back of his checkbook and discussed their information informally, he says, with another member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. Then the matter was dropped. The simple and shocking breach of security by supposed members of the CIA was brought to no one's attention.

The CIA traced their escape route through Mexico City to Fidel Castro's Havana, which is apparently the new jumping-off point for Moscow. The rest of the trip was possibly by Soviet trawler. Martin and Mitchell themselves were smugly silent about their escape route because, they said, other defectors may want to follow them.

President Eisenhower denounced both men as traitors and suggested that the entire U.S. security-clearance procedure be reviewed. Harry Truman thought they should be shot. The U.S. intelligence community braced for an onslaught of congressional investigations. Meanwhile, back in Moscow, William Martin and Bernon Mitchell, their babbling press conference brought to a halt by a Soviet official who thought it was going on too long, began to sink into the limbo that the Soviet Union reserves for turncoats who have been milked of their last drop of propaganda value.

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