Gay Traitors' Gay-ness Not to Blame For Treason, as They Weren't Actually Gay
William Hamilton Martin and Bernon Mitchell worked for the NSA back in the late 1950s, when the NSA was still wiretapping on coconut radios and pterodactyl phonographs. In 1960, they flew to Mexico, then to Cuba, and took a freighter to the Soviet Union, where they were immediately granted citizenship and gave a press conference where they announced that they'd fit in much better in the USSR because the USSR wasn't full of squares and phonies (it was 1960, remember). Back home, everyone decided that these two had defected because they were totally gay for each other.
The only problem: theyweren'ttotally gay for each other , or anyone else.
After interviewing more than 450 individuals about the twosome's character, habits, and sex lives--right down to the skin rash on Martin's stomach--the NSA, in a 1961 report, could find no conclusive evidence the two men were gay. "Martin and Mitchell were known to be close friends and somewhat anti-social, but no one had any knowledge of a homosexual relationship between them," investigators reported. Both, in fact, had American girlfriends, and Martin married a Russian woman four months after his arrival there. Mitchell also wed later.
The Martin/Mitchell case has been used as the definitive proof that gays will betray their country given the first opportunity, which is why the NSA purged a bunch of "perverted" employees and "revamped employment-screening and in-house security practices" to ensure that the only queen working for American intelligence and law enforcement would remain J. Edgar Hoover.
In fact, Martin and Mitchell were both red-blooded all-American lady-lovers. They would've fit in perfectly in the modern-day Republican party!
But then they apparently did have personal secrets to protect, NSA investigators found. One of Martin's regular companions was a Baltimore stripper known as Lady Zorro; she told investigators she had as many as 40 "dates" with the mathematician, who always paid in large amounts of cash.
A source described Martin as "totally devoted to his all-controlling sadomasochism," and an Ellensburg man said Martin had "perverted sexual relations with Japanese females [while in the Navy] and with women in the State of Washington." The acts apparently involved watching, or joining in with, two women having sex.
Both men reportedly regretted their defections, once they met Russian women. (Hey-o! We'll be here all week, thank you.)
The Worst Internal Scandal in NSA History Was Blamed on Cold War Defectors' Homosexuality [SW]