Retired colonel guilty of spying
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MIAMI - A federal jury in Tampa took two hours yesterday to find a 74-year-old Florida man guilty of espionage for smuggling thousands of pages of U.S. classified documents to the KGB.
George Trofimoff, the German-born son of Russian immigrants and a retired colonel in the U.S. Army Reserve, faces a life term in prison.
Trofimoff stood erect and showed no emotion when the verdict was announced. Defense attorney Daniel Hernandez said he will appeal.
According to testimony, Trofimoff was one of the Kremlin's most prized undercover assets during the Cold War, earning a Soviet medal for valor.
With his conviction on a count of conspiracy to commit espionage, he became the highest-ranking member of the U.S. military ever found guilty of spying for a foreign power.
"George Trofimoff ... wasn't casual, and he wasn't a sloppy spy," Assistant U.S. Attorney Laura Ingersoll said during closing arguments Monday. "In a very real sense, he was the perfect spy."
From 1968 to 1994, Trofimoff was the civilian chief of an Army interrogation center in Nuremberg, Germany, where Soviet-bloc refugees and defectors were questioned. The center also housed volumes of secret documents detailing what the United States knew about the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact nations.
Prosecutors said Trofimoff collected $300,000 for photographing U.S. intelligence documents and giving them to the KGB through boyhood friend Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, a Russian Orthodox priest and go-between.
Among the information prosecutors said Trofimoff smuggled to the Soviets were CIA documents and details of what the United States knew about Soviet military preparedness.
Trofimoff, who lives in an upscale community for military retirees on Florida's Atlantic coast and collects a $71,000-a-year military pension, was arrested last year in Tampa while trying to collect more money he thought was coming from the KGB.
In his defense Monday, Trofimoff said, he never betrayed U.S. secrets and only claimed to have done so because he thought the grateful Russians would pay him money he needed to cover big credit-card debts.
When he gave the account that he now maintains is hollow braggadocio, Trofimoff thought he was talking to an official of the Russian Embassy. But the man was really Dmitri Droujinsky, an FBI agent in disguise.
Jurors laughed at Trofimoff when he testified it was a coincidence that he was able to name several Soviet spies when shown them by an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian diplomat.
Jury foreman Mark King said only one vote was needed.
Trofimoff became a U.S. citizen in 1951, joined the Army in 1953 and was honorably discharged three years later. He was hired as a civilian in Army intelligence in 1959.
During the trial, federal prosecutors scored a historic first by having a former high-ranking KGB official take the witness stand.
Oleg Kalugin, 61, is now a U.S. resident, but during the Cold War he was a major general and KGB chief of counterespionage.
Under oath, Kalugin confirmed Trofimoff had been a KGB operative and said he secretly met with him twice, in Austria and the Crimea in the 1970s.
Sentencing was set for Sept. 27.
The case against Trofimoff emerged out of the tiny scraps of paper smuggled out the Soviet Union by former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, who for more than a decade scribbled notes from the secret police's most closely held files.
Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.