In September 1960, two U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) cryptologists, William Hamilton Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, defected to the Soviet Union. A secret 1963 NSA study said that: "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."
Martin and Mitchell met while serving in the U.S. Navy in Japan in the early 1950s and both joined the NSA on the same day in 1957. They defected together to the Soviet Union in 1960 and, at a Moscow press conference, revealed and denounced various U.S. policies, especially provocative incursions into the air space of other nations and spying on America's own allies. Underscoring their apprehension of nuclear war, they said: "we would attempt to crawl to the moon if we thought it would lessen the threat of an atomic war." Within days of the press conference, citing a trusted source, Congressman Francis E. Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), said Martin and Mitchell were "sex deviates", prompting sensational press coverage. U.S. officials at the National Security Council privately shared their assumption that the two were part of a traitorous homosexual network. Classified NSA investigations, on the other hand, determined the pair had "greatly inflated opinions concerning their intellectual attainments and talents" and had defected to satisfy social aspirations. The House Un-American Activities Committee publicly intimated its interpretation of the relationship between Martin and Mitchell as homosexual and that reading guided the Pentagon's discussion of the defection for decades.
Early lives and careers William Hamilton Martin (May 27, 1931 – January 17, 1987) was born in Columbus, Georgia. His family soon moved to Washington state where his father was president of the Ellensburg Chamber of Commerce. He graduated from Ellensburg High School after two years. After studies at Central Washington College of Education (now Central Washington University), he earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Washington in Seattle in 1947. He enlisted in the United States Navy and served from 1951 to 1954, working as a cryptologist with the Naval Security Group in Japan. As hobbies, Martin played chess and collected Japanese sword handles (tsuka). Bernon F. Mitchell (March 11, 1929 – November 12, 2001) was born and raised in Eureka, California, and enlisted in the US Navy after one year of college. He gained experience as a cryptologist during a tour of duty in the Navy from 1951 to 1954, serving in Japan with the Naval Security Group at Kami Seya. He stayed on in Japan for another year, working for the Army Security Agency. Following his Navy service, in 1957 he earned a bachelor's degree in statistics at Stanford University. Martin and Mitchell became friends during their Navy service at the Naval communications intercept facility at Kami Seya, Japan. They kept in touch as each returned to school after their Navy service and encountered one another again when each was recruited into the National Security Agency (NSA) in 1957. Their years at the NSA were uneventful. Martin gained enough recognition that he was twice awarded scholarships for study toward a master's degree.
Background to defection Mitchell and Martin became disturbed by what they learned of American incursions into foreign airspace and realized that Congress was unaware of those NSA-sponsored flights. In February 1959, in violation of NSA rules, they tried to report what they knew to a Congressman, Ohio Democrat Wayne Hays, who had expressed frustration with the information he was receiving from the NSA. In December 1959, the pair visited Cuba, without notifying their superiors as required by NSA procedures. According to Galina Mitchell, Bernon Mitchell's widow, Bernon Mitchell and William Martin were not communists; they chose the Soviet Union for two reasons: there women could work equally with men, and because the USSR had a developed chess culture.
Defection On June 25, 1960, Mitchell and Martin flew on Eastern Airlines flight 307 from Washington to Mexico City. They flew from there to Havana and then sailed on a Russian freighter to the Soviet Union. On August 5, the Pentagon announced that they had not returned from vacation and said: "there is a likelihood that they have gone behind the Iron Curtain." On September 6, 1960, they appeared at a joint news conference at the House of Journalists in Moscow and announced they had requested asylum and Soviet citizenship. During the conference, the defectors made public for the first time the mission and activities of the NSA in a prepared statement written, they said: "without consulting the Government of the Soviet Union". It said that: "the United States Government is as unscrupulous as it has accused the Soviet Government of being". They also said:
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
