Former National Security Agency employee charged with spying

February 23, 1996
Web posted at: 3:30 p.m. EST

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania (CNN) -- Robert Stephan Lipka, a former Army employee of the super-secret National Security Agency (NSA) was arrested Friday on charges of spying for the former Soviet Union in the 1960s and '70s in return for cash payments.

The formal charge said Lipka conspired with other people, of whom three were named but none was charged. The FBI identified the alleged confederates as an East German immigrant couple, Peter Karl Fischer and Ingeborg Else Dora Fischer, and Artem Petrovich Shokin, a Soviet citizen employed at the United Nations in New York from 1965-70. Fischer and Shokin were KGB agents and Mrs. Fischer was helping her husband spy, an FBI affidavit said.

"Not an Ames case"

Lipka, 50, who worked for the NSA in 1964-67, was arrested by the FBI without incident at his home in Millersville, Pennsylvania, authorities said. At a federal court hearing in Philadelphia, Lipka was to be charged with transferring classified documents to the Soviet Union but "this is not an Ames case by any means," said an FBI official, referring to the huge spy scandal involving former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) official Aldrich Ames, who was convicted of passing some of the nation's most closely guarded secrets to Moscow.

Lipka, who used the code name "Rook," sold secrets to the former Soviet Union from 1965 to 1974, according to an arrest warrant filed Friday by the FBI. The government said Lipka retrieved envelopes containing $500 each time he was paid by the Russians for the NSA material he passed to a Soviet contact he knew as "Ivan". On two occasions Lipka received $1,000, the government said.

No death penalty

Sources said Lipka told a cooperating witness for the government that he carried top secret documents out of the NSA building inside his shirt or wrapped around his leg. NSA security guards check briefcases and package as employees leave work, but do not search bodies.

Although Lipka allegedly provided the classified information two decades ago, no statute of limitations applies to an espionage charge. Federal officials said they would not seek the death penalty.

High-level security clearance

As an NSA employee, Lipka had access to intelligence communications and code-word level clearance, according to one Justice official, who declined to be identified by name. Using satellites and receiving stations around the world, the NSA eavesdrops on international communications, breaks codes of other countries and creates the codes that secure U.S. communications.

Lipka allegedly passed the documents to the Soviets during the 1960s when he was an Army enlisted man serving at the NSA, a Pentagon agency headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, a federal law enforcement official said. Another official said Lipka was paid in cash increments of $1,000 for the documents, but the total payments could not immediately be learned.

Officials were unable to say what led the FBI to Lipka so long after his alleged spying or what his present occupation was but they said he apparently had been motivated by money. Justice Department officials said the case had been under investigation for several years. But one official sought to minimize the importance of Lipka's arrest, describing the case as "mediocre." An FBI official said there was no evidence of spying after the mid-1960s.

Rush Limbaugh critic

Lipka frequently wrote letters to the editor of the Lancaster Sunday News, for which he had written a coin column in the 1970s and early 1980s, according to the newspaper. Last Sunday, the newspaper published a Lipka letter critical of Rush Limbaugh, the talk show personality whose conservative views are aired on hundreds of radio and television stations.

"The Rush Limbaugh show has become the Republican high-tech version of Nazi Joseph Goebbels and his obvious methods to subvert and distort the truth have finally reached a point where someone must begin to point them out on a daily basis," Lipka wrote.

Lipka's next-door neighbor, David Johnson, said the Lipkas, who have two young sons, were polite neighbors and never raised anyone's suspicions until the FBI surrounded their home with about a dozen marked vehicles this morning.

Lipka entered Millersville University in the fall of 1967 and graduated in the summer of 1972. He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, according to university records.

G. Terry Madonna, a professor at Millersville University, remembered Lipka "as kind of a campus activist" who wrote occasional op-ed pieces for the student newspaper. "I had him for a class. ... I remember debating him," Madonna said. "He came from a libertarian point of view, kind of hostile to government."

Espionage cases involving NSA have been rare. The Justice Department in the mid-1980s obtained the conviction of Ronald Pelton, a former NSA employee, for passing extremely sensitive intelligence information to Moscow.

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