ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, February 24, 1996 TAG: 9602260042
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: WASHINGTON
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
Reaching back into the dark world of Cold War espionage, the FBI on Friday arrested a former employee of the super-secret National Security Agency on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, some 20 years after his alleged betrayal had ended.
The FBI arrested Robert Stephan Lipka, 50, at his home in Manor Township, Pa., in what sources suggested could be one of many long-dormant espionage cases to be reopened or resolved as a result of disclosures emerging from Moscow - and clues from defectors - after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Lipka, a clerical worker in the Army when he worked at the security agency, is charged with supplying at least three Soviet agents with top-secret defense information in the form of reams of classified NSA teletype printouts from 1965 to the mid-1970s.
In court papers, the FBI detailed an undercover sting against Lipka that began as early as 1993. An FBI agent, posing as a Russian spy, told Lipka that Moscow was trying to re-establish contact after decades of silence.
Federal prosecutors insisted Friday that, even though Lipka's alleged espionage is part of America's distant Cold War past and was on behalf of an adversary that no longer exists, it doesn't lessen the damage he caused to U.S. national security.
At a time when the Vietnam War was raging and the U.S.-Soviet nuclear standoff was intense, ``he had access to the highest secrets of the U.S. government,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Barbara Cohan told a federal magistrate at Lipka's hearing Friday. ``You only had to look at what was going on during 1965 and 1967 to infer what those secrets were.''
In its investigation of Lipka, the FBI gained the cooperation of an unidentified witness who has been granted immunity and who claims that she had long known of Lipka's alleged espionage.
Yet the FBI first may have learned of the alleged spying through a recent defector. While few defections have been in the news, sources said that at least two dozen officers of the Soviet KGB secret police have changed sides in the last 15 years - many of them since the Soviet empire began to unravel. It may be that Lipka was among the names of spy suspects that a KGB defector gave the FBI in the spring of 1993.
Author Ronald Kessler first disclosed in his book on the FBI that such a defector was working with the bureau and said Friday that sources he declined to identify told him that Lipka was among those accused by the defector.
To add to the intrigue surrounding the Lipka case, a 1994 book by a former KGB major general caught the eye of U.S. officials because it briefly mentioned that the KGB had a spy inside the NSA who had never been caught - and who fit Lipka's description. Although the FBI's investigation was under way before the book was published, the FBI used its contents in its undercover operation by sending Lipka pages from it in an effort to smoke him out.
Intelligence officials said Friday that Lipka was not as big a spy as either infamous CIA mole Aldrich Ames or John Walker, who ran a spy ring in the Navy. But Oleg Kalugin, the former KGB major general and author of the book ``The First Directorate,'' said the KGB considered any source at the NSA to be highly prized. The NSA handles code-breaking and highly sensitive eavesdropping for the U.S. intelligence community.
The KGB paid him packages of as much as $1,000 at a time at dead-drop sites, according to an FBI agent's affidavit.
In his book, Kalugin said that Lipka ``handed us the NSA's daily and weekly top-secret reports to the White House, copies of communications on U.S. troop movements around the world and communications among [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] allies.''
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Robert Lipka\Faces spying charges. color.by CNB