TAMPA, Fla. — A former U.S. intelligence agent was convicted Tuesday of spying for the Soviet Union during the Cold War by selling thousands of U.S. military documents to the Soviet secret police.
A federal jury in Tampa deliberated less than two hours before finding George Trofimoff, 74, guilty of espionage. He was charged with selling secret U.S. military documents to the Soviet KGB while he was chief of the U.S. Army Joint Interrogation Center in Nuremberg, Germany, from 1969 to 1994.
U.S. District Judge Susan Bucklew set sentencing for Sept. 27. Trofimoff faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
The key evidence against him was a videotape of a meeting he had in 1999 with an FBI undercover agent posing as a Russian spy. In the videotape, which was shown to the jury, Trofimoff described how he took documents from his office to his home, photographed them and sold the film to the KGB.
Trofimoff denied he was a spy. During his three-week trial, he testified that he lied during the meeting with the undercover agent in hopes of getting money from the Russians.
"The whole story was a lie," Trofimoff testified Monday.
Trofimoff was born in Germany to Russian parents. He became a U.S. citizen and retired from the U.S. Army Reserves as a colonel, making him the highest ranking officer ever charged with espionage. He moved to Melbourne, Florida, in 1995 and was working as a grocery store bag boy until his arrest last June.
Prosecutors say Trofimoff was recruited as a spy by his foster brother Igor Susemihl, a priest in the Russian Orthodox Church who was also a KGB agent. Susemihl died in 1999.
A former KGB officer identified Trofimoff at the trial and said he met with Trofimoff twice during the 1970s to discuss his espionage activity.