Jonathan Pollard’s release from prison a couple of weeks ago attracted a lot of attention. But another more important spy—Ronald Pelton—was paroled last week. They are both the last of the 1985 “Year of the Spy” inmates to be let out into society 30 years after they were caught.
In fact, Pelton, a former National Security Agency analyst was one of the NSA’s most damaging spies before the Edward Snowden revelations. Pollard’s story shouldn’t be viewed in isolation. The Pollard and Pelton cases mark the end of a Cold War spy era, a tidier era of ideological polarities when the enemy was in focus, not diffuse and spread out.
For defections and spy catching, 1985 was a remarkable year. Major intelligence officers like KGB London Station Chief Oleg Gordievskydefected from the East to the West, a top West German counter-intelligence officer Hans-Joachim Tiedge defected from the West to the East and another KGB officer Vitaly Yurchenko defected from the Soviet Union to the United States, only to return to the Soviet Union a few months later.
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