Ex-Army Officer Guilty Of Spying

A retired Army man was found guilty Tuesday of selling Cold War military secrets to Moscow over two decades, becoming the highest-ranking U.S. officer to be convicted of espionage.

Grainy, undercover surveillance tape sealed George Trofimoff's fate with a Tampa jury, reports CBS News Correspondent Bobbi Harley. It shows the double life led by the 74-year-old: by day a Florida retiree bagging groceries at the local market, by night the retired colonel conducted business with someone he thought was a Russian operative. Instead it was an FBI agent.

The retired colonel in the Army Reserves oversaw an intelligence center in Germany from the 1960s to 1990s. He was working as a grocery store bagger last year when he was arrested in an FBI sting trying to collect money he thought was coming from the Russians.

Trofimoff stood erect and showed no emotion when the verdict was announced. His wife wept.

Sentencing was set for September 27 and could get up to life in prison.

"What this case should do is send a message to those we entrust our nation's secrets to that if you sell those secrets, if you spy against the United States, we'll pull out all the stops to catch you, to bring you to justice and to convict you," federal prosecutor Laura Ingersoll said.

From 1968 to 1994, Trofimoff was the civilian chief of an Army interrogation center in Nuremberg, Germany, where refugees and defectors from the Soviet bloc were questioned. The center also housed volumes of secret documents detailing what the United States knew about its Soviet adversaries and other Warsaw Pact nations.

Prosecutors said Trofimoff collected $300,000 for photographing U.S. intelligence documents and giving them to the KGB through a go-between, boyhood friend Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, a Russian Orthodox priest.

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.

A former KGB general testified that Trofimoff was one of the Soviet Union's top spies during the 1970s. He said Trofimoff was even brought to a resort for Soviet military officials as a reward.

Intelligence experts say that while Trofimoff wasn't as dangerous as more notorious spies in the CIA and the FBI, he was still able cause significant damage.

"He could provide to his Soviet handlers a rather clear picture of what we wanted to know and that in turn allowed them to have a reasonably good sense of what we already knew," explained Gen. (ret) William Odom.

Trofimoff, born in Germany to Russian emigres, wept on the stand as he described growing up hating communists because some of his family members were unable to escape the Bolshevik Revolution and were killed.

He insisted that he never was a spy, but pretended to be one because he needed money. But jurors laughed at Trofimoff when he testified it was a coincidence that he was able to name several Soviet spies whn shown them by an undercover FBI agent posing as a Russian diplomat.

Jury foreman Mark King said only one vote was needed: Jurors agreed Trofimoff was guilty after viewing a videotape of him describing his spying activities. Deliberations took just two hours.

"Obviously, they were impressed by the evidence. I'm sure they gave a lot of consideration to the meeting that was videotaped which was the crux of the case," said defense attorney Daniel Hernandez.

Hernandez said he will appeal.

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.

Trofimoff was recruited to spy by Susemihl, a high-ranking priest for the Moscow-controlled branch of the Russian Orthodox church, investigators said. Susemihl was arrested and freed in 1994; he died five years later.

Trofimoff, who married five times, concealed his activities for years from U.S. authorities and his wives. He carefully copied the documents at night in his basement, investigators said.

He was living in a military retirement community in Melbourne when he was arrested. As authorities closed in, Trofimoff was captured on videotape in 1999 putting his hand to his heart and telling an undercover agent posing as a Russian agent: "I'm not American in here."

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