Espionage Ussr

Nine letters written by Albert Einstein reveal that the father of modern physics had a love affair during World War II with a purported Soviet spy, Sotheby's auction house said. It said the letters, to be sold at an auction in New York on June 26, were written by Einstein to Russian emigre Margarita Konenkova. He wrote to her in the Soviet Union from his home in Princeton, N.J., during the post-war period between November 1945 and July 1946.

A former intelligence analyst with a supersecret Pentagon agency was indicted on charges he was a spy for the Soviet KGB. A grand jury in Alexandria, Va., alleged that David Sheldon Boone, analyst for the National Security Agency, spied for the Soviet security and espionage agency in the late 1980s, then fell prey this year to an FBI sting operation. The department said the Soviets paid Boone $60,000 for a variety of top-secret documents. Boone was arrested last month at a Virginia hotel.

A retired Army intelligence analyst was charged Tuesday with selling the Soviet KGB top secret documents from 1988 to 1991, including sites targeted for tactical nuclear attack if the former Soviet Union struck the United States first. David Sheldon Boone, 46, who was assigned to the National Security Agency, allegedly walked into the Soviet embassy here and volunteered his services to Moscow, delivering his first classified document for $300.

A former FBI agent was sentenced to 27 years in prison Monday for spying for Moscow before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. Earl Pitts, 44, the second FBI agent caught spying, had been charged with selling U.S. intelligences secrets to the Russians for more than $224,000 from 1987 to 1992. Prosecutors had sought a sentence of nearly 24 1/2 years. But U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis told Pitts his crimes were especially severe and said Pitts has yet to fully apologize.

Former FBI agent Earl Pitts says anger as well as money led him to betray his country, and he is offering to be a "guinea pig" for studying what causes people to do such a thing, a published report said. Newsweek magazine, in editions on sale today, reported on interviews with Pitts' psychiatrist, David Charney, who interviewed the former agent in prison. Pitts was sentenced to 27 years in prison.

The original Soviet handler of confessed spy Aldrich H. Ames is quoted in a new book as saying Ames turned over valuable information from the beginning of his spying, rather than duping the Soviets at the start with worthless data as Ames has claimed.

Breaking decades of silence on perhaps the most sensational espionage case of the Cold War, a retired Soviet spy says Julius Rosenberg helped organize a 1940s espionage ring for Moscow but was not directly involved in stealing U.S. secrets about the atomic bomb. Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, were executed in the Sing Sing electric chair in 1953 for what then-FBI Director J.

He is behind bars and barbed wire for what is left of his life; this round, soft, sly, sometimes funny, mostly sad, always hopeful little grandfather. This master spy they call the Meister. This human relic of the Cold War. This East German intelligence agent who stole America's military secrets for eight years and caused, in the still angry opinion of one American pursuer, more damage than any spy in the history of East-West tensions.

Former Sgt. Clayton J. Lonetree, the only Marine ever convicted of espionage, quietly returned to private life Tuesday after serving eight years in a military prison. Lonetree, 34, left the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in a closed van. After a stop at the drive-up window of a bank nearby, he got into a car with an unidentified man and was whisked away without responding to reporters' shouted questions. Lonetree originally got 30 years in prison, reduced eventually to 15 years.

Mary Pitts had one choice and no choice, really. Her country? Or her husband? As an FBI support clerk, she became suspicious that her husband, Earl Edwin Pitts, a career supervisory agent with the bureau, might be compromising the security of the United States. She found a letter he had left in their rural Virginia home that, FBI investigators said, indicated her husband might be giving U.S. secrets to the Russians for cash.