Background
Hamilton was born in Jaffa in around 1919.
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Victor Hamilton
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Education
He graduated from the American University of Beirut, and married Lilly Bell Drake, an American, in Libya, who persuaded him to go to the United States.
Career
He was rediscovered in a mental hospital in Russia in 1992, where he had been for 20 years. By his own account, he became a naturalized United States. citizen, and was licensed as a teacher in Georgia but was denied work because he was an Arab. He worked as a doorman until a colonel recruited him to work for the National Security Agency (National Security Agency).
Hamilton secured employment with the National Security Agency in 1957, and worked there for two years in the "A.L.L.O." (all other countries) unit, assigned to study and break coded communications of Middle Eastern governments, including (but not limited to) those involving the Soviet Union.
He suffered a nervous breakdown in February 1959, but was kept on at the National Security Agency as it had few employees competent in Arabic. He was discharged in June 1959 for mental health reasons.
He later claimed that he faked the symptoms so he could be allowed to leave the agency. In 1963, Hamilton defected to the Soviet Union.
In July, Izvestia published an account by Hamilton of his work at the National Security Agency.
Hamilton was confined for schizophrenia in the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, initially at a Kremlin hospital for high officials.
In 1971, he was transferred to Special Psychiatric Hospital Number. 5 in Troitskoye, about 30 miles south of Moscow. He was rediscovered there in 1992 by the Ark Project, which sought United States Prisoner Of War"s who might be in Soviet hands once the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics fell.
Hamilton was convinced that the Pentagon was communicating with him through the radio, then later through his television set.
