The FBI charged a former analyst with the supersecret National Security Agency with selling top defense secrets to the Soviet Union during 1988-1991 for $60,000.
The former employee of the government's top eavesdropping and code-breaking agency, David Sheldon Boone, 46, who has been living in Germany, was arrested after being lured here by an FBI sting in which agents posed as spies for Russia trying to get him to resume spying, the Justice Department said.Boone was to appear before a U.S. magistrate in Alexandria, Va.
The government said the information he delivered to a Soviet KGB agent he knew as "Igor" included details of U.S. targeting of tactical nuclear weapons in case of a Soviet nuclear attack and of the U.S. military's interception of signals intelligence, the Justice Department said.
In addition, he provided the Soviets with U.S. documents describing the movement and capabilities of Soviet forces and about Soviet tactical nuclear weapons, the government said. This included data designated "top secret" and the even more secret "sensitive compartmented information," which the government said could potentially cause grave harm to the security of the United States.
The Justice Department gave this account:
Boone volunteered to spy for the Soviets when he walked into their embassy in Washington in 1988. At that time, he got $300 from them in return for a classified document he had written based on decoded NSA intercepts of electronic transmissions by a foreign government.
He arranged to continue spying for them while he was assigned as a cryptoanalyst for the Army in Augsberg, Germany, during 1988-1991, when he left the service. During those years, he met about four times a year with Igor and was paid $5,000 to $7,000 at each meeting, for a total of more than $60,000.
Before his assignment to Germany, he spent three years as a senior cryptologic traffic analyst at the NSA's headquarters at Fort Meade, Md.