He had access to the U.S. Army and NATO war plans for Europe. In the mid-1980s, Jeffery Eugene Gregory, a Staff Sergeant in the U.S. Army, was assigned to Bad Kreuznach, Germany, with the 8th Infantry Division.
On April 29, 1993, while stationed at Fort Richardson, AK, he was arrested and charged with espionage. Eleven months later, on March 28, 1994, Gregory pleaded guilty to the espionage charge.
Gregory’s espionage
During the period when Gregory was assigned to Germany, he served as a staff driver and was involved in the maintenance of the commanding general’s mobile command center. In addition, he was assigned the duty of maintaining the division’s maps which showed the division’s military maneuvers. He also had unencumbered access to classified messages and correspondence.
Gregory was recruited into what would become known as the “Clyde Conrad espionage network” which was comprised of a number of active-duty military personnel who operated out of the 8th Infantry Division. The group sold NATO and U.S. military secrets to both Hungary and Czechoslovakia (both were members of the Soviet Bloc at this time).
The ringleader, Clyde Conrad was originally recruited as a source of classified information for the Soviet Bloc by Zolton Szabo, a U.S. Army captain who himself had been recruited to work for the Hungarian security service in 1967. Szabo’s plea deal included assisting the U.S. government to identify the sources who he had recruited.
Conrad was arrested by German authorities in 1988 and in 1990 was sentenced to life in prison for committing espionage for which he was paid $1.2 million.
Roderick Ramsay, another member of the spy ring was arrested in 1991 by U.S. authorities and sentenced to 36 years in prison. Jeffrey Rondeau was indicted by a federal grand and was ultimately sentenced to 18 years in prison.
Ramsay, was the sergeant who had recruited Gregory into the spy network, and later he was the one who ultimately identified him to U.S. law enforcement. Gregory was availed a polygraph and is reported to have failed the polygraph and confessed to the act of espionage. Indeed, he admitted to filling a military flight bag with 20 pounds of classified documents while assigned to the 8th Infantry Division.
Such was the sensitivity of the information, it is reported the Commander in Chief of the European Command, General Glenn Otis said how the “defeat of the west would have been assured had the Soviets acted on their intelligence and declared war.”
An after action assessment determined that the Conrad spy ring was successful in stealing U.S. Army secrets due to the “poor reporting culture, lack of reinvestigations” contributed to the failure to identify the soldiers who were engaged in espionage.
While Conrad pocketed a good sum of money, all Gregory received was a bit of pot and hashish and a few hundred dollars. In June 1994, Gregory was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in the spy ring. Gregory was ultimately released from prison in 2007.
