James Hall III

James W. Hall, III, was an Army warrant officer and intelligence analyst in Germany who sold eavesdropping and code secrets to East Germany and the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1988. Hall was convicted of espionage on July 20, 1989; he was fined $50,000 and given a dishonorable discharge and is currently serving a 40-year sentence for those activities at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The case against Hall apparently began based on a tip from a Central Intelligence Agency source inside the East German Government. Officials said this source defected to the West and is in hiding.

Hall sometimes spent up to two hours of his workday reproducing classified documents to provide to the Soviets and East Germans. Concerned that he was not putting in his regular duty time, he consistently worked late to complete his regular assignments. Using his illegal income, Hall paid cash for a brand new Volvo and a new truck. He also made a large down payment on a home and took flying lessons. He is said to have given his military colleagues at least six conflicting stories to explain his lavish life style, but Hall's co-workers never reported any of his unusual activities. After returning from Germany to the U.S., he traveled to Vienna, Austria, to meet with his Soviet handler. His co-workers wondered why he would re-enlist, and become an officer, after several times conveying to them his dissatisfaction with army life. Of course, the Warrant Officer rank allowed him greater access to classified material. During his tour at Detachment Schneeberg, an intelligence gathering outpost on what was the East-West German border during the "cold war," Hall seemed to have a generally good working relationship with his intelligence company buddies, but would often have a short fuse and become upset over trivial day-to-day problems. Hall also associated with several "foreigners," thought to be Turks, at a club called Reissmann's, in Bischofsgrun, W.Germany, the local hang-out for the GI's that worked on Schneeberg.

Hall was assigned to the NSA Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg, one of the premier listening posts of the cold war, between 1982-1985 and he spied for both East Germany and the Soviet Union. Between 1983 and 1988, Hall betrayed hundreds of military secrets, which includes the Project Trojan, a worldwide electronic network with the ability to pinpoint armored vehicles, missiles and aircraft by recording their signal emissions during wartime.

Hall was eventually arrested on December 21, 1988 in Savannah, Georgia, after bragging to an undercover FBI agent that over a period of six years he had sold Top Secret intelligence data to East Germany and the Soviet Union. At the time, Hall believed that he was speaking to a Soviet contact. During this conversation he claimed that he had been motivated only by money. He told the FBI agent posing as a Soviet intelligence officer, "I wasn't terribly short of money. I just decided I didn't ever want to worry where my next dollar was coming from. I'm not anti-American. I wave the flag as much as anybody else."

After his arrest, Hall said there were many indicators visible to those around him that he was involved in questionable activity. Hall's activities inflicted grave damage to U.S. signals intelligence. Remarkably, Hall believes himself only to be "a treasonous bastard, not a Cold War spy."

The FBI also arrested Huseyin Yildirim, a Turk who served as a conduit between Hall and East German intelligence officers. Hall received over $100,000 in payments.

References

• Koehler, John O. (1999). Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. ISBN 0813334098. Secret service/ Germany(East)/ History.

• Macrakis, Kristie (2008). Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 052188747X. Espionage, East German.

External Links

• NSA Field Station Teufelsberg - a late post mortem