Tale of 1980s spy ring broken in Tampa to be made into George Clooney movie

TAMPA -- During the Cold War, when the world was threatened with potential annihilation, when the United States and its allies faced the Soviet Union and its satellites in a high-stakes nuclear standoff, a group of American soldiers in Germany was giving the enemy secrets that could have crippled NATO.

The spy ring was discovered in the late 1980s. The investigation landed in Tampa where FBI agent Joe Navarro and a team of dogged agents and analysts matched wits with Roderick James Ramsay, a former U.S. Army sergeant with a near-genius IQ who drifted from his mother's trailer to a friend's house and was living out of his car.

The more-than-year-long relationship that developed between Navarro and Ramsay unlocked the secrets of a spy ring that had operated for decades, compromising the most sensitive intelligence on how the United States and its allies planned to protect Europe in the event of an invasion.

In the end, Ramsay went to prison, serving about 23 years before being released in 2013. He gave information that led to convictions for three other American military personnel who participated in the massive betrayal.

For the most part, the case drifted into obscurity after the last of the suspects went to prison.

"I frankly was always surprised that it never got as much notoriety as I thought it should," said Tampa attorney Greg Kehoe, who prosecuted Ramsay for the Justice Department, "because what these guys did so significantly compromised our NATO forces that I don't know of another case in Europe that so placed as many soldiers in jeopardy as this breach of security."

Now, 25 years after the case broke wide open, it may be about to get much more attention.

Actor George Clooney's production company, Smokehouse Pictures, has purchased the rights for a book yet-to-be-written by Navarro and another author, to be called "Three Minutes to Doomsday."

The book is pitched as "a real-life John le Carre thriller, telling the never-before-told story of how Navarro, by noticing and decoding a suspect's trembling cigarette, led him to uncover the worst security breach in U.S. history: a multigenerational spy ring that had put the United States on the brink of annihilation at the height of the Cold War. He describes the 42 interviews that entailed hundreds of hours of questioning and thousands of hours of preparation, the bureaucracy that questioned the veracity of the confessions he extracted and the ramifications of a year of interviews and nine years of trials, which left Navarro emotionally, physically and spiritually exhausted."

Navarro's book agent, Steve Ross, said the publisher Scribner paid a "substantial six-figure advance" for the proposal. The completed manuscript is due next April, and Ross said he expects the book will be published in early 2017.

Navarro's last book, "Dangerous Personalities," was published last year.

Although Navarro, a nationally recognized expert in body language, has talked with The Tampa Tribune in the past about the case, he said he couldn't now because of the pending book and movie deal. Kehoe, Navarro's former FBI supervisor Jay Koerner and Terry Moody, an agent who teamed with Navarro for some of his conversations with Ramsay, shared their memories.

Koerner said the damage done by the spy ring was enormous.

"They had a military general do a damage assessment," Koerner said.

Absent the espionage, the expert estimated "NATO could hold off a Warsaw Pact invasion for about three months before all the Americans and everybody could get up to speed," Koerner said.

With the information funneled by the spy ring to the Czechs and Hungarians, the Soviets and their allies could have "driven us out of Europe in about three weeks or less. He said, had war broken out, it would have been a disaster for NATO because they knew everything, the battle plans, everything that was going to happen."

Moody and Koerner agreed Navarro was the key to unlocking Ramsay. Few other agents could have persuaded the spy to share his secrets so expansively.

"Being around Joe, you feel unnerved," Moody said. "You feel he's always watching you. He's a student of body language. He's watching everything you do, where your hands are ... because he's a student of everyone."

"Joe, he's a perfectionist, bordering on obsessive compulsive," Koerner said. "He'd come in to talk to me in my office. He'd start straightening stuff on my desk and look at the pictures, make sure they're all lined up. But he was such a perfectionist that having one Joe Navarro working for you would be great. Two would kill you. I mean you'd really, literally die."

Ramsay came to the FBI's attention as part of an investigation into Sgt. Clyde Lee Conrad for selling secrets to Czechoslovakia and Hungary from the Army's 8th Infantry Division in what was then West Germany.

The military base where Conrad and Ramsay were stationed had the plans on how to stop a Soviet invasion.

"Thank God it never came to that," Koerner said.

"The base was an old Nazi army base, which was extremely well-made, fortified," Kehoe said. "You could see the old swastikas had been drilled off."

Koerner and Kehoe said the conspirators freely took documents out in duffel bags and whatever else they needed. They went to a safe house, where they used a videocamera to record the pages. Kehoe said they took burn bags full of papers, stopping to copy them before burning them.

"Not only were they doing it, but they were taking it over from another group of guys who were doing it prior," Kehoe said. "And those guys had taken it over from another group."

As authorities investigated Conrad, the FBI sent out advisories to interview people who had come in contact with him. One of those people was Ramsay, in his late 20s, who had left the military about four years earlier and followed his mother to the Tampa and Orlando area.

Koerner dispatched Navarro to talk to Ramsay as a matter of routine.

When the two met, Navarro sensed something was off. Ramsay's cigarette shook, and he seemed nervous and defensive. He was holding back.

Navarro told Koerner that Ramsay knew more than he was saying. He wanted to talk to Ramsay some more.

So Navarro went back, Koerner said. In that second conversation, Ramsay dropped a bombshell.

"Ramsay said: 'Yeah, Clyde gave me a little souvenir.' What was it? 'Well I got half of a dollar bill. It's cut in a certain way and if somebody comes up to me and has the other half, that's another friend of Clyde's.'

"That's called a clue," Koerner said. "That's a signal in the intelligence world and why Rod brought it out, I had no idea."

And so began a long-term mental chess game between Ramsay and Navarro, a veteran FBI agent and spy chaser, a Cuban immigrant described by Moody as a legend in the Tampa bureau.

The Ramsay case would test Navarro to his limits and take a physical and psychological toll that would last for months after the case was over.

Navarro said in 2003 that Ramsay was brilliant and a voracious reader. His IQ score was the second-highest earned on a military test.

The overriding goal for each meeting, Koerner said, was to make sure there was going to be another meeting.

The pressure on Navarro was enormous. For a time, they didn't know if the spy operation was continuing and if NATO was still in danger. There were turf wars and strategy disputes with FBI headquarters.

"The weight of the world was on him," Koerner said. "One thing scares the hell out of Navarro more than anything else -- failure. He will not fail if he can help it. ... I didn't think he was going to fail. But all it would have taken was for Rod one day to say: 'I don't want to meet with you. I don't want to talk to you anymore.' "