Education
To rectify his problems, Barnett chose to sell classified information to the Soviets.
To rectify his problems, Barnett chose to sell classified information to the Soviets.
From the 1960s until 1970, Barnett was employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, working in both the United States and Asia. Barnett was stationed in Indonesia from 1967 until 1970 and before that in South of Korea. After leaving his teaching position at Kiski, Barnett returned to Indonesia to administer a shrimp processing company.
But within six years, he had amassed debts of over $100,000 and faced imminent financial ruin.
In 1976, he approached Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) officers in Jakarta, Indonesia and offered to sell them the names of Central Intelligence Agency assets. Over the next three years in meetings held in the Embassy of the Soviet Union in Vienna, Barnett revealed to the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) the identities of some 30 Central Intelligence Agency officers.
Additionally, he handed over a great deal of classified information gathered by the Central Intelligence Agency on a clandestine operation, code-named HA/BRINK, that had focused on the acquisition of examples of Soviet military hardware sold to the Indonesians during the Sukarno era, including an Société Anonyme-2 guidance system, designs for the Whiskey class submarine, the Riga class frigate, the Sverdlov class cruiser, the P-15 Termit anti-ship missile and the Tu-16 Badger bomber. He also compromised Central Intelligence Agency operations and informants in Indonesia and South of Korea.
The Soviets paid him a total of $92,000 for information received between 1976 and 1980.
On instructions from his Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) handlers, which included Oleg Kalugin, Barnett applied for staff positions on the Senate and House intelligence committees and the President"s Intelligence Advisory Board but was unsuccessful in finding a job. In January 1979, however, he was rehired by the Central Intelligence Agency as a contract agent and if undetected, he could have gone on to betray further Central Intelligence Agency secrets. Later in the year however, Barnett was identified as a spy thanks to information given by a Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) officer stationed in Jakarta, Colonel
Vladimir M. Piguzov, who had been recruited as double agent by the Central Intelligence Agency. Piguzov himself was betrayed by Aldrich Ames in 1985 and subsequently executed.
Barnett was questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and resigned from his Central Intelligence Agency job. In October 1980 Barnett pleaded guilty to espionage charges, admitting that he had sold Central Intelligence Agency secrets to the Soviets.
He was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment and was paroled in 1990.