TAMPA, Fla. — As his wife waited in a car outside, George Trofimoff stepped inside a Tampa hotel for a meeting. The retired Army Reserve colonel with an address on Patriot Drive emerged in handcuffs, accused of spying for the Soviet Union and Russia for a quarter-century.
The 73-year-old Trofimoff on Wednesday became the highest ranking U.S. military officer ever charged with espionage, U.S. Attorney Donna Bucella said. Trofimoff allegedly photographed U.S. documents and passed the film to a boyhood friend who recruited him into the KGB.
He was arrested after an FBI agent posing as a Soviet agent lured him to the hotel with the promise of a past-due payment for spy services.
Trofimoff was under investigation by German and American officials for seven years, and the charges against him could bring a life sentence in prison. Authorities said his wife, Jutta, was not involved.
According to a federal indictment, Trofimoff sold "documents, photographs, photographic negatives and information relating to the national defense of the United States" while serving as a civilian employee of the U.S. Army at the Nuremburg Joint Interrogation Center in West Germany from 1969 to 1994. The center is where refugees and defectors from the Soviet bloc were questioned.
FBI Special Agent Frank Gallagher said it isn't clear what damage Trofimoff's alleged spying might have caused. At a hearing Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark Pizzo ordered Trofimoff held without bail and gave him a court-appointed attorney.
Trofimoff retired from his Army civilian job in 1995 after 35 years. He has been living in a gated community in Melbourne, Fla., and works as a part-time bagger at a supermarket.
Trofimoff's telephone number was unlisted.
"He's a very good neighbor and a good friend," said one resident, John Callaway. "These people are wonderful people. What happened, that's way in the past."
Born in Germany to Russian parents, Trofimoff became a U.S. citizen in 1951. He joined the Army in 1953, served for three years and in 1959 was hired as a civilian working in military intelligence.
Gallagher said Trofimoff was paid about $250,000 during his 25-year spying career but wanted more.
"He was coming to Tampa to be paid for services he supplied in the past, money he thought was owed to him in the past," Gallagher said.
Prosecutors said Trofimoff used his unlimited access to classified information at the interrogation center to tell the KGB what the United States knew about the Soviets and their allies. Trofimoff also knew of weaknesses in American intelligence-gathering and passed that information on to the KGB, the indictment said.
Trofimoff also received the Order of the Red Banner, the Soviet award presented to bravery and self-sacrifice in the defense of the socialist homeland, prosecutors said. The Soviet Union broke apart in 1991.
The indictment said Trofimoff was recruited into the KGB by Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, his old friend and a Russian Orthodox priest who served as the Archbishop of Vienna and Austria and temporary Archbishop of Baden and Bavaria.
Trofimoff allegedly took documents from the his work and photographed them, passing the film on to Susemihl and other KGB officers during meetings in Austria. The indictment also notes eight meetings between Trofimoff and KGB officers, naming the KGB agents in three instances.
Trofimoff and Susemihl were arrested in Germany in 1994 on espionage charges but were released when German officials could not prove their case within the five-year statute of limitations. Trofimoff told German authorities the money he received from Susemihl, who died in 1999, was personal loans.
There is no statute of limitations for spying under U.S. law.