James Hall III

James W. Hall III (born 1958) is a former United States Army warrant officer and signals intelligence analyst in Germany who sold eavesdropping and code secrets to East Germany and the Soviet Union from 1983 to 1988.

Hall was convicted of espionage on July 20, 1989; he was sentenced to 40 years imprisonment, fined $50,000, ordered to forfeit all proceeds from his activities, and given a dishonorable discharge. He served his sentence at the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from which he was released in September 2011 after 22 years.

Activities Hall was assigned to the NSA Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg, one of the premier listening posts of the Cold War, between 1982–85, and he spied for both East Germany and the Soviet Union. Between 1983–88, he betrayed hundreds of military secrets, which includes Project Trojan, a worldwide electronic network with the ability to pinpoint armored vehicles, missiles, and aircraft by recording their signal emissions during wartime and the complete National SIGINT Requirements List (NSRL), a 4258-page document about NSA activities, government requirements and SIGINT capabilities by country.

Hall told Agent Droujinsky, "I wasn't terribly short of money. I just decided I didn't ever want to worry where my next dollar was coming from. I'm not anti-American. I wave the flag as much as anybody else."

The case against Hall apparently began based on a tip from Manfred Severin (code-named Canna Clay), a Stasi instructor who acted as a translator and courier for James Hall. Rejected by the German Staatsschutz and the CIA, Army Foreign Counterintelligence (FCA) eventually sponsored him because he had a big tip about James Hall. After Hall was apprehended, Severin was exfiltrated to the West with his family.

After his arrest, Hall said there were many indicators visible to those around him that he was involved in questionable activity. Hall's activities inflicted grave damage on U.S. signals intelligence, and he is considered the perpetrator of "one of the most costly and damaging breaches of security of the long Cold War".

Hall confessed to giving his handlers information on the US Military Liaison Mission (USMLM)'s tank photography on New Year's Eve in 1984. On March 24, 1985, while on an inspection tour of Soviet military facilities in Ludwigslust, German Democratic Republic, US Army major Arthur D. Nicholson, Jr., an unarmed member of the USMLM, was shot to death by a Soviet sentry.

In a jailhouse interview, the first ever, with author Kristie Macrakis, he designated himself "a treasonous bastard, not a Cold War spy." The FBI also arrested Hüseyin Yıldırım, a Turk who served as a conduit between Hall and East German intelligence officers. Hall had received $300,000 in payments from the Stasi and the KGB.

After the reunification of Germany, on July 24, 1992, almost all of the documents Hall had copied and handed over to the Stasi (13,088 pages in total) were given back to the NSA by the Federal Commissioner for the Stasi Records, Joachim Gauck (later President of Germany). This was ordered by the Federal Ministry of the Interior after US government pressure without consulting or informing the German Parliamentary Intelligence Oversight Committee (:de:Parlamentarisches Kontrollgremium), which was a prerequisite for giving files away required by law (:de:Stasi-Unterlagen-Gesetz). Only a few hundred pages were retained and kept Top Secret. Gauck as well as his director Hansjörg Geiger both later claimed to not remember having ordered the return of the documents.