FYI. TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) Former FBI counterintelligence specialist Robert J. Lamphere,... By Associated Press, 2/26/2002 07:29 TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) Former FBI counterintelligence specialist Robert J. Lamphere, who supervised many of the most notorious postwar Soviet espionage cases, died Jan. 7 of prostate cancer. He was 83.
Lamphere was instrumental in providing FBI assistance to the cryptanalysts in the Army Security Agency who would eventually break the Soviet's top-secret code, one of the United State's greatest Cold War achievements. Officials deciphered intercepted messages that had been sent by the Soviet consulate in New York and its embassy in Washington to Moscow between 1944 and 1945. Information gleaned from those deciphered messages and the FBI investigations presided over by Lamphere led to the unmasking of the Rosenberg spy ring and many other Soviet spies. Julius Rosenberg and his wife, Ethel, were accused of passing secret atomic-bomb information to the Soviet Union. They were executed in 1953, the first U.S. civilians ever put to death for wartime spying. Lamphere was born Feb. 14, 1918, in the Coeur d'Alene mining district of Idaho. He attended the University of Idaho and its law school, before completing his degree at the National Law School in Washington, D.C. then joining the FBI in 1941. After leaving the FBI in 1955, Lamphere worked at the Veterans Administration. From 1961 to 1981, he was an executive with John Hancock Mutual Insurance Co. -- EOT
