With Russian intelligence networks opened, we may see some deep infiltrated agents in the West, as Russia recruited or illegally dropped them as far back as the Cold War.
A Federal Judge in Hawaii has denied bail to a married American couple, who are believed to have assumed the identities of dead children in order to lead double lives for over 20 years, according to prosecutors. Local media reports allege that Bobby Edward Fort and Julie Lyn Montague, who were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on July 22 on the island of Oahu, are Russian spies, and that their names are parts of their assumed identities.
According to the reports, the real names of the couple are Walter Glenn Primrose, 66, and Gwynn Darle Morrison, 54. Government prosecutors allege that, in the late 1980s, the couple hurriedly left their home in the state of Texas, telling family members that they were entering the US Federal Witness Protection Program. They are also said to have given some family members permission to take whatever they wanted from their home, before it was foreclosed.
The government claims that the couple then assumed the identities of two infants, Bobby Edward Fort and Julie Lyn Montague, who had died in Texas in 1967 and 1968 respectively. They then used these infants’ birth certificates to obtain social security cards, drivers’ licenses, and even US passports. In 1994, while living in Hawaii under his assumed name, Primrose enlisted in the US Coast Guard, which is the maritime security and law enforcement service branch of the US military. He served there for over 20 years as an avionic electrical technician with a secret level clearance. Following his retirement in 2016, Primrose is said to have worked as a private contractor for the US Department of Defense until his arrest on July 22 of this year.
A search of the couple’s Oahu home turned up Polaroids of the couple wearing jackets that appear to be authentic Russian KGB uniforms. The snapshots were taken in the 1980s.
It was impossible to buy that uniform in the US before the Soviet collapse in 1991. A hypothesis of a prank, or possible role-plays wearing the KGB uniform in the 1980s, is inconsistent with the facts, therefore.
There are also unconfirmed reports that Primrose lived in Romania during the Cold War. He maintained passports under both of his names, and used them to travel abroad. It was possible to recruit him a Warsaw Pact country.
Primrose reported some of his foreign trips to his employer, but not all, such as for example several trips to Canada, which was required by his security clearance according to court documents. Government prosecutors further claim that invisible ink instruments, coded documents and maps of US military facilities were found in the couple’s home in the town of Kapolei. When left alone during the raid but recorded, the couple appeared to communicate to each other in manners “consistent with espionage,” said Myers, the prosecutor.
Both Primrose and Morrison have denied they are foreign spies, saying they are American-born. They also claim that the photos of them in KGB uniform were part of a prank they played with the help of a friend. This explanation seems insufficient, as Primrose had security clearance. Code documents and maps of military facilities are not a hoax and, combined with other evidence, develop a sound evidence base to accuse of espionage.
It is likely that espionage charges will follow in the coming weeks.
Primrose and Morrison, both born in 1955, were more than a decade older than the birth dates listed on their new IDs. They remarried under their assumed names in 1988, according to court records. Morrison used her real name to open a post office box, where she told family to contact her. When her father died, her family couldn’t reach her and enlisted local law enforcement to track her down. This fact confirms the couple did not want anybody to track their past.
There is photographic proof and confirmation by three people who knew Primrose as Chief Petty Officer Bobby Fort, when he was stationed in Alaska at U.S. Coast Guard Air Station Kodiak from 2013 to 2016. There, the chief petty officer was attached to C-130 aircrews, whose mission includes long-range flights from Kodiak for patrolling and surveillance of the Bering Sea, the Arctic Circle and the Russian border. His mission, therefore, sided completely with Russia’s intelligence interests, as relations with the US escalated amid Crimea’s annexation and the war in the Donbas.
A photo shows a smiling CPO Fort in his blue operational dress uniform in a cart inside a cavernous air station hangar. He also appears in a photo accompanying a June 2014 posting on the U.S. Coast Guard District 17 where he can be seen in a C-130 hangar. The event commemorated the visit of then-D17 commander Rear Admiral Dan Abel at Air Station Kodiak.
If Russia sought to have a mole in Alaska, the air station at Base Kodiak in Alaska would be an ideal posting. Anyone with security clearance could learn where commercial and military vessels are at any time in the Bering Sea.
Although the Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Department operates a military launch facility for rockets and missiles less than an hour’s drive from Kodiak, where some advanced hypersonic missile technology has been tested. That way, Primrose’s potential also met Russia’s scientific and technical intelligence needs as for hypersonic missiles, as the Kremlin was actively developing them during that time.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Wayne Myers acknowledged that Primrose “may have some troubling foreign connections,” and described Morrison as having had anti-government, anti-military views.
Although compromising photos at home suggest the spies are incompetent, on the one hand, we believe there is a hypothesis of Glenn Primrose and Gwynn Darle Morrison being sleeper agents recruited during the Cold War to infiltrate the US defense system. A long-term work for Russian intelligence might contribute to the loss of vigilance, though, particularly if Russian supervisors mothballed contacts with their agents.
The Primrose-Morrison case reveals the scale of Russian intelligence network in the West and astonishing depth of possible infiltration into government bodies and social institutions, provided the agents were dropped as early as during the Cold War. To this must be added those who emigrated from Russia after the Soviet breakup, became citizens, and were able to integrate into society in the last three decades.
