An Offer the Soviets Refused

One freezing night last week, a burly figure stealthily flipped a fat manila envelope, wrapped in a sheet of plastic, into the parking lot of the Soviet embassy's seven-story residence in northwest Washington. The packet was addressed FOR THE RESIDENT--EYES ONLY, meaning, in spook jargon, that it was intended for the KGB spymaster who lived in the apartment building. Suspecting that it was a letter bomb planted by anti-Soviet Jewish activists, a Soviet watchman summoned U.S. officials, who in turn called in U.S. Army demolition experts.

They gingerly opened the envelope and found not a bomb but contents even more explosive in their own way. The package was crammed with secret CIA documents--papers detailing the agency's internal structure, the names and addresses of CIA officials and informants, and the locations of CIA "safe houses" and training sites. An unsigned note described the documents as merely a sampler. For $200,000, the Soviets would get additional secret papers and the names of CIA agents who might be vulnerable to seduction by the KGB. The note instructed the Soviets to make two payoffs--$3,000 to be dropped off at 2 p.m. the next day beside a fire hydrant in an affluent neighborhood of Bethesda, Md., and a second payoff of $197,000 at the same place a few hours later.

Shortly after dawn, some 50 FBI agents ghosted into the Bethesda neighborhood, concealed in cars, vans and a trailer. At the prescribed hour, an agent dropped the bait, a dummy payoff package, beside the hydrant. For the next hour or so, all was tranquil. Several children passed the hydrant on their way to skate on a nearby pond. One boy spotted the package and stopped, but a husky man emerged from a brick house and ordered him on his way. The man began to rake leaves around the house. Several times he approached the package but did not touch it. Finally, when the leaves had been raked into neat piles, he reached down and grabbed the bait.

FBI agents burst from their hiding places and arrested him without a struggle. They identified him as Edwin Gibbons Moore II, 56, who retired in 1973 after a 20-year career with the CIA. He was charged with delivering defense information to a foreign government, unauthorized possession of national defense documents and embezzlement of U.S. property. Thus Moore became the first CIA official ever accused publicly of trying to sell out his country.

Moore's various duties for the CIA apparently included "logistics," but the agency refused to be more specific. After a heart attack in 1973, he retired on an estimated $15,000-a-year disability pension. Father of four children and a voluble antiCommunist, he was considered a bit eccentric by neighbors. They reported that he was the sort of man who would rail at their teen-age sons one day and try to make amends the next by righting their overturned garbage cans.

Moore's alleged attempt to peddle defense secrets to the Soviets was bizarre but not inept. A veteran U.S. intelligence operative told TIME: "The Soviets bungled this thing--not Moore." Had he telephoned the Russian embassy, he might have been wiretapped. Had he tried to broach the deal with the Soviets in a park or on a street, he might have been seen. Said the U.S. official: "He tried to do it the safe way by tossing the packet to them in the dark. He never figured they'd fumble it. The Soviets let an intelligence bonanza slip through their fingers."

After the arrest, FBI agents searched Moore's house for six hours and took away two large cardboard boxes. TIME has learned that the contents included classified CIA documents dating from after Moore's retirement. Horrified, intelligence officials immediately began investigating the calamitous possibility that Moore had accomplices within the CIA. The agency had the further problem of whether to declassify the papers so that they could be used as evidence. Said an official: "The CIA must weigh that against the national interest." Indeed, it was not inconceivable that the CIA would decide letting Moore go free would be a less risky course than disclosing what was in the documents.

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