Report: 2 Cold War codebreakers who defected to Russia weren't gay as alleged
On June 25, 1960, after four years as trusted employees of America's largest spy agency, [William Hamilton] Martin, then 29, and [Bernon] Mitchell, then 31, flew out of Washington, D.C., with one-way tickets to Mexico City. From there, they quietly slipped off to Havana and took a Russian freighter to the Soviet Union, following a plan that had evolved over a year. The case stunned politicians and intelligence officials alike. Looking back, some of the defectors' neighbors and co-workers told investigators that if they'd been more vigilant about the pair's sexual proclivities, maybe they'd have been more suspicious of their patriotism....
But according to the NSA's own investigative files, obtained exclusively by Seattle Weekly, there's one major problem with the flaming traitor theory: Martin and Mitchell weren't gay. The formerly classified Pentagon and NSA documents, which reveal previously unpublished details of the historic spy-agency saga, appear to clear Martin and Mitchell of the sexual charges that rocked the country 47 years ago this summer and led to landmark NSA policy changes.
"Beyond any doubt," the unnamed author of a then-secret NSA study on the defection wrote in 1963, according to the recently released documents, "no other event has had, or is likely to have in the future, a greater impact on the Agency's security program." Screening methods used today at NSA, with a work force estimated at 30,000, evolved from Internal Security Act legislation passed in the wake of the pair's defection.
After interviewing more than 450 individuals about the twosome's character, habits, and sex lives—right down to the skin rash on Martin's stomach—the NSA, in a 1961 report, could find no conclusive evidence the two men were gay. "Martin and Mitchell were known to be close friends and somewhat anti-social, but no one had any knowledge of a homosexual relationship between them," investigators reported. Both, in fact, had American girlfriends, and Martin married a Russian woman four months after his arrival there. Mitchell also wed later.
Read entire article at Rick Anderson in the Seattle Weekly
But according to the NSA's own investigative files, obtained exclusively by Seattle Weekly, there's one major problem with the flaming traitor theory: Martin and Mitchell weren't gay. The formerly classified Pentagon and NSA documents, which reveal previously unpublished details of the historic spy-agency saga, appear to clear Martin and Mitchell of the sexual charges that rocked the country 47 years ago this summer and led to landmark NSA policy changes.
"Beyond any doubt," the unnamed author of a then-secret NSA study on the defection wrote in 1963, according to the recently released documents, "no other event has had, or is likely to have in the future, a greater impact on the Agency's security program." Screening methods used today at NSA, with a work force estimated at 30,000, evolved from Internal Security Act legislation passed in the wake of the pair's defection.
After interviewing more than 450 individuals about the twosome's character, habits, and sex lives—right down to the skin rash on Martin's stomach—the NSA, in a 1961 report, could find no conclusive evidence the two men were gay. "Martin and Mitchell were known to be close friends and somewhat anti-social, but no one had any knowledge of a homosexual relationship between them," investigators reported. Both, in fact, had American girlfriends, and Martin married a Russian woman four months after his arrival there. Mitchell also wed later.