The Stupid Spy

To the neighbors around Bay Shore, L.I., Robert Glenn Thompson, 30, seemed average enough--an overweight (6 ft. 2 in., 250 Ibs.) and overworked Air Force veteran who scratched out a living for his German-born wife and three kids by running a home fuel-oil delivery service. Last January, when Thompson was arrested by the FBI and charged with committing "13 overt acts of espionage" for the Russians between 1957 and 1963, the folks in Bay Shore were predictably surprised. Just as predictably, Thompson denied all. But last week he changed his mind, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn, and blabbered his sordid little spy story to the press.

"To Hell with It." It began in West Berlin in July 1957, after Airman Second Class Thompson, then 22, had been chewed out by his commanding officer because he needed a shave. That night Thompson drowned his resentment in cognac, brooded about his job as a clerk in the Office of Special Investigation at Berlin's Tempelhof Air Base. "You lived in a state of terror," he recalled. "Everyone in our office was watching someone. We all watched each other."

After 20 shots of cognac, Thompson "decided to hell with it." He walked into East Berlin wearing civilian clothes; no one checked his pass. He contacted Communist intelligence officers, said he wanted to defect. Three men questioned him for six hours in the sun porch of a private house overlooking a lake. Thompson was pretty drunk; the Soviets told him they didn't think he would be a good spy and sent him back.

Toward Revenge. About ten days later, Thompson was walking at night near Tempelhof when a black DKW with three men inside pulled up. "They called out my name and told me to get in; one of them had a pistol," said Thompson. "They took me back to the same place I was before, only this time the atmosphere was different. They threatened to 'double-agent' me--meaning one of their agents would get word to my superiors that I was working for them. They interviewed me for nine hours that time, and I smoked a lot of cigars. I agreed to work with them." For most of the next five months Thompson carried a Minox camera in his tobacco pouch, snapped pictures of Confidential and Secret reports that crossed his desk (he was not cleared for Top Secret). He delivered from 50 to 100 photographs every two weeks. Occasionally he got money--an average amount was $12.50 for a batch of photographs. "I wasn't in this for money. I was disgusted, and it was part of my plan to get revenge," he said. No one in his outfit seemed to suspect anything.

In January 1958, Thompson was ordered to report to the Air Force base in Great Falls, Mont. "When I told them, the Russians got shook up and excited," he recalled. "They gave me $1,000 and told me to buy a short-wave radio and tune in on a special part of the band and listen for the code words 'Amour Lenin.' " The Reds gave him a cigarette lighter decorated with four aces and told him a Soviet agent with an identical lighter would meet him in front of a movie theater in Smiths Falls, Ont., 1,650 miles away, to which Thompson was to travel on certain Sundays. The agent would ask, "Are you from Toledo?" and Thompson would reply, "Yes, since June 23, 1932."

Thompson says that once back in the U.S. he reneged on the Russians and did no more spying while in service. He got an honorable discharge in December 1958 and went to Detroit. There he was approached by a Russian named Boris Karpovich, a Soviet embassy counselor in Washington who was kicked out of the U.S. in January. Boris told him to get a job with the FBI. Thompson, a high school dropout, said with rare perspicuity that he doubted the FBI would hire him. For nearly two years thereafter the Soviets left him alone.

"Not Even Gas Money." Then, in mid-1961, Fedor Kudashkin, former chief of Russian translators at the U.N., arrived in Detroit and put on the pressure. Frightened, Thompson moved to Long Island. Kudashkin tracked him down in November 1961, threatened to expose Thompson's sleazy spy work, and Thompson agreed to help out where he could. "He wanted me to supply information about water reservoirs on Long Island, on the gas lines between New York and Long Island, on the power plants in these areas."

Sometimes Kudashkin asked for "background investigations" on people living on Long Island, and Thompson would "pose as an insurance man and question a man's neighbors and credit agents and so forth." Thompson met Kudashkin dozens of times--sitting in Thompson's oil truck in parks, beneath water towers, in railroad parking lots. Whatever Thompson's information was worth to Kudashkin, it wasn't worth much to Thompson. "I never even made my gas money," said Thompson.

Finally in the spring of 1963, Thompson realized the jig was up when he saw two men in a nearby car taking pictures of him and Kudashkin. "I knew it was the FBI; Kudashkin was sloppy in his work," Thompson explained. Shortly after that Kudashkin went back to Russia for "imperative family reasons." FBI men continued to watch Thompson for 15 months, finally picked him up in August 1964, and he began to spill his story to agents. Most of it was not news to them. The FBI had been spying on Thompson's spying ever since he came back to the U.S. in 1958.

After he pleaded guilty last week, sentencing was postponed until May. The maximum penalty is death, but Thompson said to newsmen: "I want to take what's coming to me. I made a bad mistake when I was 22. I was stupid." No one could fault him on that.

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