Convicted spy Rod Ramsay as a potential Gardner heist suspect (Part One)

Convicted spy Rod Ramsay as a potential Gardner heist suspect (Part Two)

Ramsay had been perhaps its most prolific member, in terms of the sheer number of documents he managed to steal. After over ten years of the spy ring’s successful operation, however, a defector from Hungarian Intelligence alerted NATO and the Americans about a huge number of classified documents, being passed to Hungary, from somewhere in West Germany.

The FBI first interviewed Ramsay about security breaches at the Eighth Infantry headquarters on August 23, 1988. It had been almost three years since he was honorably dischraged from the Army. Ramsay was house sitting at the time, and although this visit from the FBI was unexpected, Ramsay was not unprepared.

While speaking with the feds in the place where he was staying, the former army sergeant took from his wallet a mysterious slip of paper, which had been given to him by Conrad. Ramsay turned it over to the FBI agent interviewing him, Joe Navarro. The paper had a hand-written telephone number written on it, which Conrad told Ramsay he could use if he never needed to contact him.

When the meeting with Ramsay was over, Navarro took the slip of paper with him. An FBI lab determined that the note given to Ramasay was written on a water soluble paper, favored by Eastern European intelligence services. The paper dissolved instantly, when exposed to any liquid or saliva, which made for easy disposal and destruction of sensitive information, in an emergency.

The Army had first learned there was a spy somewhere in their ranks when Lt. Col. István Belovai, of the Hungarian Strategic Military Intelligence Service contacted the CIA, to warn them that Hungary was receiving a substantial number of top secret NATO documents from somewhere inside West Germany. The classified documents included NATO battle plans, detailed descriptions of nuclear weapon locations and troop movements. Belovai also provided a list of specific items, which allowed the Army to narrow their focus on possible suspects to those who would have had access to those particular documents.

But before the investigation was complete, Belovai, who had been under suspicion for about a year, was arrested by Hungarian counterintelligence agents, in 1985, while making a pickup at a CIA drop in Hungary.

Perhaps Conrad was tipped off by his Hungarian contacts of Belovai’s arrest, or maybe it was a coincidence, but Conrad retired from the U.S. Army that same year. Ramsay also left the Army that year, at the end of his enlistment in November, later claiming he intentionally failed a urinalysis test and used that to get out of the Army without being pressured by Sergeant Conrad to reenlist.

For that first interview with Ramsay, Navarro was accompanied by Al Eways of the U.S. Army Intelligence Security Command (INSCOM). It was Eways who had done much of the dogged investigative work, combing through Army personnel files and the backgrounds of individual soldiers, who fit the profile by virtue of having access to some of the classified documents known to be taken, in their search for whoever it was that had been leaking vast amounts of classified information to the Hungarians.

The effort led to the identification of Conrad as a suspect, and perhaps Ramsay as well. If it was not already a well established conclusion that Ramsay was involved, it seems doubtful that Eways would have been riding along with Navarro’s in Tampa, Florida, on the same day as Conrad’s arrest thousands of miles away in West Germany. The Army had no jurisdiction over Ramsay, a civilian.

It was during this first meeting with Navarro that Ramsay learned that his former Army supervisor, and fellow spy, Clyde Lee Conrad, was under investigation for espionage. He must have known that he too was likely under suspicion although the agents he met with that day tried to downplay that possibility.

But it would be nearly two years before Ramsay was arrested and jailed in solitary confinement, three years before he was charged with anything, and over four years before he was finally convicted of espionage, even though he had confessed and was pleading guilty. The investigation, prosecution, and eventual conviction of Ramsay was peculiar, even in comparison with the other members of the same spy ring.

For twenty months, after having implicated himself in espionage, Ramsay was free to come and go as he pleased. There was not even any surveillance on him of any kind for over a year, or so Navarro suggested in his book.

Nine days after our September 20 interview, the Kercsik brothers pick Rod Ramsay out of the photo lineup we sent and confirm he was involved in the Conrad case. The next day, FBIHQ once again orders us to break off all contact with Ramsay—an all-caps ORDER this time, the kind you can’t ignore. By the time I’m again allowed to talk with Rod Ramsay, 357 days later, Lynn Tremaine is married and gone from the Tampa office, and the case against Ramsay has gone cold as a Russian winter." Ramsay was seemingly left to his own devices to try to figure out something he could do to extricate himself from his seemingly hopeless predicament. Perhaps counter intelligence operatives were interested in what Ramsay would do in such a desperate situation, and sought to find out whom he would contact, by keeping him under surveillance in secret.

In a scene in the fictional TV series The Americans, a Russian spy character named Nina Krilova, remarked to one of the FBI's spy-catchers in an episode:

“What do you want with us? With Arkady and the others at the Rezidentura? Do you want to put them in jail? That's how policeman thinks, not how spies think. We want everyone to stay right where they are, and bleed everything they know out of them forever.”

So it might well have been with Ramsay. The FBI’s desire to gather information from him, including information he would not readily give up voluntarily was a higher priority than prosecuting him for espionage, especially at the outset.

Less than a week after their first interview with Ramsay, he told them that in January of 1986, he had met with Conrad in Boston where he was residing at that time. Perhaps his espionage activities had ended with the end of his enlistment and return to the United States, but it the obligation of federal investigators to ensure that was indeed the case, and if not then find out what new projects he had taken on in the espionage realm, which posed a danger to national security.

During the time of the FBI's first round of meetings with Ramsay, ABC News reported that Conrad’s recruits continued to work for Conrad back in the United States, illegally exporting hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips to the Eastern Bloc, through a dummy company in Canada.

Ramsay admitted to being the source of that ABC News story but said that he and Conrad had actually only discussed illegally exporting to the Easter Bloc. They had never followed through on it. Ramsay, was admitting, however, that he and Conrad had at least considered engaging in criminal acts inside the United States.

Facing the possibility of decades in prison, or even life, Ramsay, to escape this fate, would have had to come up with a plan, something big, given the kind of manhunt that he, as one of the most prolific spies in American history, would be up against, if he simply successfully robbed a place and fled.

Ramsay would need a caper big enough to make such a manhunt something that could be either withstood, or unnecessary, something where he could make some kind of a deal. At the very least it would have to be able to help make his life more comfortable while he was inside prison, and perhaps after he got out, as well..

Meanwhile Clyde Lee Conrad was not cooperating in any way and never did. The master spy who recruited Ramsay and others, earning for himself millions of dollars from America’s enemies, died in prison, less than ten years later, having never admitted to any wrongdoing. He denied all of the charges against him, and never implicated Ramsay or anyone else.

Ramsay may have had buyer’s remorse, he might have been disappointed with the deal he was getting for all of his cooperation with investigators, he might have felt bad that he had given up his friend Conrad, who had steadfastly refused to cooperate.

Other criminals, who like Ramsay, had entered into a cooperative relationship with the FBI, had exploited their status as witnesses and informants to commit additional crimes with impunity.

In 1975, a career criminal named Robert “Deuce” Dussault, along with seven other armed men. pulled off Rhode Island’s Bonded Vault heist. The Bonded Vault was a secret mob bank, inside an old fur storage building in Providence, RI. One of the largest robberies in US history, the thieves stole an estimated $30 million in cash, gold, and jewelry from safety deposit boxes. The heist is considered the biggest in the criminal history of the Northeast.

Well into the 1980's, Dussault, who had turned on his fellow gang members and became a star witness against them to save himself, was being flown back to Providence, RI to testify at the trial of his fellow robbers, from Colorado, where he was in the witness protection program.

During that time, Dussault proceeded to engage in a crime spree, including armed robberies, right when federal prosecutors were still depending on his testimony against the people involved in the Bonded Vault robbery.

In a book on the Bonded Vault case, called “The Last Good Heist,” the authors wrote that “even after all these years, it’s still unclear just how far federal investigators went to protect Dussault [from arrest and prosecution].” WPRI-TV investigative reporter Tim White one of the co-authors of the book, said in an interview on Rhode Island’s NPR affiliate, WNPN, that "Robert Dussault "robbed banks and businesses absolutely blind while under the thumb of the federal government."

“Deuce’s now unclassified FBI file shows him escaping from a state prison in Colorado on October 28, 1985; twenty one days later he was robbing a bank there. How many other robberies he may have committed that year state and federal authorities are either unable or unwilling to say.”

Another famous example from that same era as the Gardner heist was James "Whitey" Bulger, who “rose to power as a secret informant to the FBI and relied on FBI agents to help him get away with murder and extortion.” At the same time “Bulger was credited inside the Justice Department with helping take out the top and middle tier of the local Mafia.”