Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [40]
But how to get out of this assault unit? Peloquin solved the problem by deploying two talents he would rely on for the rest of his life: an ability to curry favor with important older men and a talent for job hopping ever upward.
His boss, Peterson, had a problem that Peloquin could solve. The bad seeds and ex-cons in his unit were racking up courts-martial at an astonishing pace. And the Uniform Code of Military Justice—which was then new, and which governs the way military personnel should be tried and punished—was causing Peterson fits. He was of the old school and didn’t understand how the new rules worked. He sent Peloquin to the Naval Justice School in Newport, Rhode Island, far from the fighting in Korea. On returning to the beach masters, Peloquin helped solve Peterson’s backlog of court-martial cases. From then on, Peloquin recalls, “I was kind of his boy.”
After seeing some combat at Inchon in Korea, Peloquin took advantage of a navy loophole and went to law school without promising extra years of service in return. He spent a few peaceful years at Georgetown Law, and after graduation received orders to join a destroyer in Pearl Harbor. Peloquin protested to his superiors that the bar exam was just a few months away—why send him to Hawaii before he had passed the bar? The answer was clear. Navy rules required only that he graduate from law school to practice law in the navy. He didn’t have to be a member of any bar. Passing the bar, as far as the navy was concerned, was his own business, to be conducted on his own time.
Peloquin didn’t like that answer. He resigned from the navy. During his time in law school in Washington, Peloquin had reported to the same navy facility that also housed a supersecret code-breaking and electronic eavesdropping entity: the National Security Agency. It was so covert that its acronym, NSA, is still jokingly said to mean No Such Agency. The NSA happened to be just down the hall from Peloquin’s navy office. He worked his connections there, and landed a job in 1954.
Peloquin found the work fascinating. It was his first exposure to the world of intelligence. He worked in the security office, helping to vet and investigate the agency’s own employees suspected of being spies for the Soviet Union. While working there, he became familiar with the case of two American defectors: William Martin and Bernon Mitchell. In 1960, these two men defected to the Soviet Union, saying that they opposed U.S. policy on spy flights over enemy countries.
Martin and Mitchell had gotten advance word that Peloquin and other NSA investigators were snooping around. That prompted panic: the two men had long been selling information about the NSA’s code-breaking abilities to the Soviet Union, and getting caught could mean spending the rest of their lives in federal prison. They decided to make a dash for freedom, taking planes to Mexico City, then Cuba, and finally Moscow. All they left behind was an anti-American manifesto in a safe-deposit box at a bank.
But Peloquin says the NSA wasn’t nearly as close to discovering the truth as Martin and Mitchell thought. It was investigating the two men, but not for spying. The investigators were instead trying to figure out if Martin and Mitchell were gay. This was a time when even a suspicion of homosexuality created doubts about a person’s loyalty to the government—and could end a career. Peloquin says the NSA had no idea the two men were active spies for the Soviet Union. But rumors of their sexual orientation had prompted the NSA’s security people to start an internal investigation. If Martin and Mitchell had stayed, it is possible