Sold nuclear secrets to the Soviets
THE YEAR WAS 1988, and Florida cabbie Roderick Ramsay — after peddling nuclear secrets to the KGB and bringing the U.S. to the brink of Cold War defeat — couldn’t get arrested.
FBI agent Joe Navarro knew that for a fact.
The law enforcer was fighting with all he had to bring the traitorous Ramsay to justice, only to find himself thwarted at every turn by the FBI’s so-called experts in espionage.
Over the course of a yearlong investigation, Navarro determined that Ramsay, a former U.S. Army sergeant with a geniuslevel IQ, played a key role in selling NATO’s war plans to the Soviets.
The deal left the West defenseless at the height of the Cold War.
Included were not only the Army’s contingency plans for a ground war in Europe, but the locations of nuclear sites throughout Western Germany.
This was information so sensitive it was classified as “COSMIC Top Secret.” But there was more.
Locked in Ramsay’s photographic memory were reams of U.S. defense secrets. Russia would generously reward Ramsay if he defected. It was a choice he could make at any moment.
But the FBI flatly dismissed Ramsay’s tale as unbelievable. If any of his astonishing claims were true, why would such a smart guy implicate himself by spilling to Navarro?
Therein lies the story told by Navarro in a gripping new book, “Three Minutes to Doomsday: An Agent, a Traitor, and the Worst Espionage Breach in U.S. History.”
Navarro, later to become a founding member of the FBI’s legendary behavioral analysis program and an internationally recognized expert in body language, opened the investigation into Ramsay on the basis of a trembling cigarette.
“It shook three times,” Navarro insisted to his boss, who was reluctant to authorize an espionage case out of the FBI’s Tampa bureau based on a twitching smoke.
“Three times that cigarette shook like a polygraph needle when I mentioned Clyde Lee Conrad.”
Retired Army Sgt. Conrad was already charged with selling classified documents to the KGB.
Conrad spent years in G-3, the war plans section of the 8th Infantry in the German town of Bad Kreuznach. Army intelligence became interested in Ramsay because he was among thousands of the sergeant’s former co-workers.
Navarro was dispatched to interview Ramsay about the Conrad investigation. The FBI agent fixated more on the interviewee’s cigarette than his actual answers, convinced that Ramsay knew something.
But the Washington bureau had lost almost all interest in the case once Conrad and several cohorts were taken into custody overseas.
Navarro pressed on. What he learned would send U.S. experts in the shadowy worlds of intelligence, security and nuclear weaponry scrambling to make largescale changes.
Since nothing concrete connected Ramsay to Conrad, he was free to walk away at any time. Navarro’s challenge was to “seduce” Ramsay into sharing the details of how, and to what extent, he had betrayed his country.
The ensuing courtship was based on behavioral clues. Ramsay, though an “acnescarred, dope smoking, scrawny 150-pounder,” boasted the second-highest IQ ever recorded on the basic military intelligence test.
When Navarro first encountered Ramsay, he was living in his mother’s trailer in Tampa after getting tossed out of the Army. A routine drug test found cannabis in his urine.
Navarro used the failed test as a bonding moment. A squarejawed FBI agent from the movies would have radiated disapproval, but this one just laughed.
The two became buddies — but only up to a point.
Though Navarro was frantically reading books to keep up with Ramsay’s avid intellect, he could never allow the suspected traitor to feel superior.
When Ramsay imperiously demanded to know Navarro’s security clearance, for instance, the agent shut him down hard.
“Roderick,” Navarro said, lowering his voice and leaning forward to make their eye contact more intense, “I’m cleared for weird, do you understand?”
Navarro pulled Ramsay into subsequent interviews under the pretext of needing his help in understanding how Conrad, the custodian of the G-3 war plans, ran things. Ramsay appeared eager to share.
With his feet propped on the coffee table, the Army veteran talked about how the sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll vibe of the base made it easy to steal top-secret documents.
“All they had to do was put (the documents) in a burn bag and then pull it back out of the bag before they got to the burn facility,” he confided.
At the end of the each day, classified material was bundled and