A
BYTE OUT OF HISTORY
The Spy Who Struck Out
12/30/04
Monday, December
10, 1984. The Cockatoo Inn, Hawthorne, California. Thomas Cavanagh,
a defense contractor engineer in Pico Rivera, offered to sell secrets
on U.S. radar deflecting stealth bombers to two undercover FBI agents
posing as KGB officers. Cavanagh said he needed money to "get the
creditors off my back." Strike 1.
Wednesday, December
12. The Lucky Lodge Motel, Bellflower. Cavanagh handed over
manuals and blueprints he'd smuggled out of the company plant underneath
his coat. He told our undercover agents the info was worth "billions
of dollars." He added: "I feel like I can bring more documents
out [but] I gotta have money, okay?" Strike 2.
Tuesday, December
18. Hyatt Hotel, City of Commerce. Cavanagh turned over more
materials. Our agents paid him $25,000. Cavanagh agreed to sell more
secrets for another $30,000. Strike 3, you're out. We arrested
Cavanagh on the spot. He pled guilty, and in March 1985, was sentenced
to life in prison.
To borrow from
Ben Franklin, in this case an ounce of prevention was worth a pound of
cure. FBI Agents had learned of Cavanagh after he'd contacted
Soviet embassies in San Francisco and Washington. They set up the sting,
and as then FBI Director William Webster said, prevented "irreparable
damage" to national security.
Turns out, the
Cavanagh case was just the tip of the iceberg. In the mid-1980s,
we uncovered a wave of spies in the U.S.—the most since World War
II. A dozen individuals were charged in 1984 alone. And the press dubbed
1985 the "year of the spy" after a series of major arrests
and prosecutions.
Their motivations? Unlike
the ideologues of the 1940s and '50s, the spies of the '80s were mostly
free agents driven by greed. Forty-year-old Cavanagh, for example, wanted
to erase his heavy debts. "I'm after big money," he'd told our
agents.
The end of the
Cold War brought this chapter of espionage to a close, but the story
continues. Now, two decades later, the names and faces have
changed, but the foreign counterintelligence threat is as potent as ever.
Our priorities:
- Keeping weapons
of mass destruction and other embargoed technologies from falling into
the wrong hands;
- Preventing the U.S.
government and intelligence community from being penetrated by other
countries or international terrorists;
- Making sure critical
national assets—things like weapons systems, advanced technologies,
trade secrets, and military capabilities—are not compromised.
To learn more about
our response to twenty-first century intelligence threats, see our Counterintelligence
Division website.
