Defected by Martin and Mitchell

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The defection of Martin and Mitchell is an event that took place in 1960, when two cryptologists from the US secret service NSA fled abroad in the midst of the height of the Cold War . From Moscow from clarified William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell to the public about the extensive and hitherto top-secret actions and interceptions of the NSA.

course

The NSA cryptologists Martin and Mitchell fled to the Soviet Union via Mexico and Cuba . There, on September 6, 1960, at a press conference in the house of the Soviet Union of Journalists, they announced the NSA's SIGINT awareness-raising activities and declared that they would renounce their US citizenship .

In front of reporters from all over the world, the defectors described how the NSA, founded in 1950, spied on numerous countries, and that this also includes its own allies. They told how the NSA succeeded in cracking the encryption code of the Turkish embassy in Washington (a NATO member), how the USA had been doing espionage flights for many years. a. carried out with U2 scouts over the territory of the Soviet Union and that America secretly carried out the overthrow as hostile governments. It was then that Mitchell and Martin were telling the world what the NSA was doing:

“From our work in the NSA, we know that the United States is listening to the secret communications of more than 40 countries, including those of its own allies ... The NSA has more than 2000 manual wiretapping workstations ... both encrypted and communications In plain language, almost every nation in the world is bugging, including the states on whose soil the eavesdropping stations are located. "

Further life story

They both acquired Soviet citizenship and married. Martin studied in Leningrad and was divorced again in 1963. He began to regret his emigration and tried unsuccessfully to re-enter the USA in the 1970s. Eventually he emigrated to Mexico and died in Tijuana in 1987 . Little is known about Mitchell's further life, however; he died in Saint Petersburg in 2001 .

consequences

A secret study by the NSA in 1963 explained the seriousness of this event:

"Beyond any doubt, no other event has had, or is likely to have in the future, a greater impact on the Agency's security program."

Since the two were assumed to have a homosexual relationship, the FBI subsequently drew up a list of all suspected homosexuals in the USA. US President Dwight D. Eisenhower had it drawn up a blacklist , which amounted to a relapse into the surveillance zeal of the McCarthy era .

See also

literature

  • James Bamford : NSA. America's most secret intelligence agency. Orell Füssli, Zurich 1986, ISBN 3-280-01670-3 .
    • (Original: The Puzzle Palace - Inside the National Security Agency, America's Most Secret Security Organization. Penguin Books, 1982, ISBN 0-14-006748-5 .)
  • Wayne G. Barker, Rodney E. Coffman: The anatomy of two traitors: The defection of Bernon F. Mitchell and William H. Martin. Aegean Park Press, Walnut Creek CA 1996, ISBN 978-0894120411 .
  • David M. Barrett: Secrecy, security, and sex: The NSA, Congress, and the Martin-Mitchell defections. In: International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, 2009 (22), pp. 699-729.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Duncan Campbell : Inside Echelon - On the history, technology and function of the global interception and filter system known under the name Echelon , Telepolis from July 24, 2000
  2. ↑ Rick Anderson: The Worst Internal Scandal in NSA History Was Blamed on Cold War Defectors Homosexuality . In: Seattle Weekly , July 17, 2007. Archived from the original on December 27, 2013. Retrieved June 17, 2013.