Businessman Asked To Spy In Russia

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29299, 2 September 1960, Page 11

Businessman Asked To Spy In Russia

CHICAGO, August 31. A young Chicago businessman claims that the Central Intelligence Agency tried to recruit him as a spy in 1958 before he went on a trip to the Soviet Union.

Mr Robert Berlin, the 28-year-old vice-president of a sales company, toid the Chicago “American” yesterday that he refused, after thinking over the offer, because of the risk involved and because he did not think it was right for a tourist to spy. The newspaper said that C.I.A. headquarters in Washington would make no comment on Mr Berlin’s case but a spokesman said: “It’s our business to seek information wherever we can get it, just as the Russians try to get information, and it is a lot easier for them to get it” The paper said Mr Berlin told them he had only revealed’ the C.I.A. approach now because the United States Government had been protesting against American tourists being ejected from the Soviet Union on the grounds that they were spies. Mr Berlin said the C-I.A. agent approached him in June, 1958, and “asked if I would consider making certain mental observations while I was travelling in the Soviet Union.”

Two missing United States security agents might be linked to the shooting down of the U-2 spy aeroplane and the RB-47 reconnaissance aeroplane, a Congressman said today. Mr Francis Walter (Democrat, Pennsylvania), chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, said he was convinced that* the Russians had advance knowledge of the U-2 flight on May 1, and the RB-47 flight in July. "I think the whereabouts of

those aeroplanes was known to Russia,” Mr Walter told reporters, “and 1 think there is a strong possibility that the two incidents tie in with these missing agents.” The two men, Bernon Mitchell and William Martin, disappeared last June and are believed to have gone to Russia. They were employed on secret code work at the National Security Agency. Mr John McCormack, Democratic majority leader in the House of Representatives, said yesterday he had information indicating that the two men took valuable cryptographic information with them when they disappeared. He asked Mr Walter’s committee to make an investigation.

A State Department document today showed that a former Boston University professor and wartime intelligence officer, Dr. Maurice H. Halperin, was now working for the Soviet Government. The document was published in the Congressional record at the request of Senator Kenneth B. Keating, a member of the Senate Internal Security Sub-committee-The State Department said there were indications that Halperin was now advising the Russians on Latin American affairs, on which he was “something of an authority.”

Halperin was suspended and later dismissed from his university teaching job in 1953 because he refused to tell Senate investigators whether he had ever been a member of the Communist Party.