Former GI Gets Life in Prison for Spying : West Germany: The retired U.S. Army sergeant was convicted of passing secret NATO plans to the Soviet Bloc.

BONN —  In a case described as one of the most serious instances of treason in the post-World War II era, a West German court Wednesday sentenced a retired U.S. Army sergeant to life in prison for passing top-secret NATO battle plans to the Soviet Bloc.

Clyde Lee Conrad, 42, from Sebring, Ohio, was convicted of passing wartime deployment plans to East Bloc agents in such detail that Western defenses in Germany would have collapsed before they could even form, according to Justice Ferdinand Schuth of the Koblenz high court, which heard the case.

Schuth said the information passed by Conrad to the Hungarian and Czechoslovak secret services “endangered the entire defense capability of the West.” In the event of a Warsaw Pact attack, it could have forced North Atlantic Treaty Organization commanders almost immediately either to abandon the defense of West Germany or order the use of nuclear arms.

“There has been no case of treason even remotely comparable in its seriousness,” chief West German federal prosecutor Kurt Rebmann said during a summing-up last week.

Conrad is believed to have been paid more than $1.2 million for the material, although no money has been found. In pronouncing sentence, Schuth described him as “ice cold and unscrupulous”.

The judgment followed a 24-day trial, in which the court reviewed over 5,000 pages of evidence.

The former sergeant first class, white-haired and dressed in a dark sports coat and tie, was led away by police after the verdict. His lawyers said they will appeal.

The seriousness of the security breaches caused by Conrad, who had a top-secret clearance and access to the most sensitive of NATO material in his job as an archive clerk at the U.S. Army’s 8th Infantry Division headquarters in Bad Kreuznach, 50 miles southwest of Frankfurt, recalled an earlier spy scandal involving a U.S. Navy enlisted man, John Walker.

Walker, a communications specialist, passed Moscow secret codes used by Navy vessels, enabling the Soviets to eavesdrop on highly sensitive Navy communications.

Conrad, a Vietnam veteran described by those who knew him as friendly and modest in his manner, reportedly had 13 years in the service and a clean military record at the time he was granted his top secret clearance in 1978. However, court documents indicated that he had already established contact with Hungarian intelligence three years earlier.

The contact was made through Conrad’s superior at the time, former U.S. Army Sergeant 1st Class Zoltan Szabo, who himself was convicted last year of spying by an Austrian court. Szabo cooperated with the prosecution by providing evidence against Conrad.

Trial documents indicated that Conrad spied purely for financial gain, selling alliance documents relating to nuclear and conventional battle plans to East Bloc agents between 1975 and 1985, when he retired with an honorable discharge. In those 10 years, Conrad passed information pinpointing the locations of NATO unit deployments in time of crisis, their supply and ammunition dumps and the lines of communications.

He was arrested in August, 1988, in the West German city of Kaiserslautern, near Bad Kreuznach, where he lived with his German-born wife and 15-year-old son.

His two Hungarian contacts, Imre and Sandor Kercsik, were arrested simultaneously in Gothenburg, Sweden, where they worked as physicians. The Kercsiks, who are brothers, either hand-carried the material back to Hungary or delivered it to the Hungarian Embassy in Stockholm.

Conrad also passed documents to Czechoslovak agents, for which he was sentenced separately to a four-year prison term.