
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, June 9, 1990                   TAG: 9006090273
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SPY CASE CALLED DAMAGING

The government charged in federal court in Tampa, Fla., on Friday that a former Army sergeant was part of a spy ring that provided valuable military secrets to Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union for which he may have been paid between $2.2 million and $5 million.

An FBI agent told a federal magistrate that Roderick James Ramsay, 28, of Tampa, who was arrested Thursday night, sold information of importance to the East Bloc up until 1985.

"It's one of the most serious breaches ever," said Joe Navarro, who led the investigation of the spy ring.

According to an affidavit by Navarro, Ramsay sold plans for the overall defense of Central Europe by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, documents about the use and deployment of tactical nuclear weapons by the United States and its allies, military communications technology and papers about how various alliance forces would be coordinated.

A Justice Department official said the case was "significant from the point of view of damage to United States security interests."

Another senior official said that the information Ramsay was charged with providing to the East bloc was "extremely serious" and that his arrest would provide a fuller picture of how the spy ring operated.

Ramsay, the government said, is cooperating in the investigation.

He was recruited, according to Navarro, by his immediate superior, another sergeant, Clyde Lee Conrad, who is thought to have been the leader of the spying enterprise.

Conrad was convicted of treason in West Germany on Wednesday, sentenced to life in prison and ordered to forfeit $1.7 million.

Conrad and Ramsay had top-security clearances and were part of a unit in West Germany that was charged with safeguarding sensitive documents.

Ramsay has told the FBI that in one week in December 1985, he made a videotape of hundreds of documents in order to sell it to intelligence agents of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

Ramsay told Navarro that he was paid $20,000 for his help in securing documents for sale. But Navarro told a federal magistrate Friday that investigators believe Ramsay may have received as much as $5 million for his efforts.

Somehow Ramsay ended up poor, the agent testified, and was reduced to sleeping in a car in Tampa.

Navarro said that Ramsay was a person of great intelligence who spoke several languages and "had the ability to recall minute details, facts and figures, some from documents he hadn't seen in five or six years."

The magistrate, Elizabeth Jenkins, ordered Ramsay held without bond and adjourned the hearing until Tuesday.

Whatever he was paid for his services, Ramsay would be another example of a trend in espionage cases over the last decade in which the principal motivation was money.

Last month, a special advisory panel to the Senate Intelligence Committee recommended several changes to deal with the issue of officials volunteering to provide secrets to other countries for financial gain.

One of the panel's recommendations is to use periodic polygraph, or lie-detector, tests for people in sensitive positions like Conrad and Ramsay.

While the information that the two sergeants are alleged to have sold may be obsolete or moot because of the profound changes in East-West relations occurring in Europe, Sen. David L. Boren has said that the syndrome of betrayal for money was still worrisome.

by CNB