The Sword AND The Stone (Part Nine)
Blog Table of Contents
Both wire services (UPI and AP) reported about the meeting Ramsay had with Conrad in Boston in 1986, but neither Traitors Among Us nor Three Minutes to Doomsday mention this meeting on American soil. And while the Boston Globe ran the same AP story, by James Martinez as did other newspapers around the country and the world, the Boston Globe version did not include the part about Ramsey’s clandestine meeting with fellow spy Clyde Lee Conrad in 1986. Here in the city where the espionage took place, the meeting was cut from story.
In comparing coverage with that of his fellow spy Clyde Lee Conrad, Ohio newspapers wrote local angle stories about Ramsay’s fellow spy Clyde Lee Conrad and even the New York Times wrote one with a dateline of his hometown, Sebring, Ohio.
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| Retired U.S. Army Sergeant Clyde Conrad convicted in Germany of high treason June 6, 1990 |
The 1990 Rod Ramsay Espionage Case in the Media
Among the curious aspects of media
coverage of the Ramsay espionage case is both the lack of coverage in Boston, and the
lack of “Boston” in the coverage. Ramsay first appears in the media and the
pages of the Boston Globe because of a leak in 1988 to the Washington Post,
though he is not named.
On August 26, 1988 Stephen Kurkjian, then the Boston
Globe’s Washington bureau chief wrote that "He [Conrad] recruited another
member of the US Army for espionage and paid him a sum in five figures for
military documents."
It would be almost two years before It became known publicly that the other member of the US Army who had received that five figure sum was Boston area native Rod Ramsay.
It would be almost two years before It became known publicly that the other member of the US Army who had received that five figure sum was Boston area native Rod Ramsay.
According to Traitors Among Us, Ramsay was “raised in a suburb of Boston in a
broken family, he [Ramsay] had joined the army directly after high school.”
But Ramsay was five weeks shy of his
twentieth birthday when he entered the Army in November of 1981. He graduated from high school at the New York
Military Academy in 1980. Ramsay went to
Northeastern University, only a short walk from the Gardner Museum for a brief time
after he graduated from high school, as his personal google+ page, a free social
media service that was later phased out, showed for over two years.
In Three Minutes to Doomsday, author Joe Navarro writes
that Ramsay told him he joined the Army right out of high school. Navarro's book as with Traitors Among Us makes no reference to Boston at all except to remark on Ramsay’s “slight Boston
accent” upon first meeting him. Neither book ever physically places Ramsay in the city of Boston.
At Ramsay’s arraignment in June of
1990 “Navarro testified that before joining
the Army on Nov. 17, 1981, Ramsay had robbed
a bank in Vermont and, while working as a security officer in a hospital, had
attempted to break into a safe,” but there is no mention of where Ramsay was
living at the time of the bank robbery (Boston) or where the hospital he was
working in was (Boston).
Ramsay himself referenced his
connection to the Boston area in a 1997
interview, while still in prison, stating" “In the summer of 1985, I
intentionally failed a urinalysis test and used that to get out of the Army
without being pressured by Sgt. Conrad to reenlist. I was discharged in
November and went back to live in Boston.
Both wire services (UPI and AP) reported about the meeting Ramsay had with Conrad in Boston in 1986, but neither Traitors Among Us nor Three Minutes to Doomsday mention this meeting on American soil. And while the Boston Globe ran the same AP story, by James Martinez as did other newspapers around the country and the world, the Boston Globe version did not include the part about Ramsey’s clandestine meeting with fellow spy Clyde Lee Conrad in 1986. Here in the city where the espionage took place, the meeting was cut from story.
From the original AP story: “Ramsay's
last known contact with Conrad came in January 1986 in Boston,
when his former boss gave him a small cow bell and told him that anyone
displaying a similar bell was involved in the spy ring, the agent testified.
While the FBI has no evidence that Ramsay participated in espionage since 1986
[in Boston].”
In addition, there were four picture
of Ramsay, which ran In news stories after he was arrested. Three of the photos
have a paparazzi quality. They are all
profile pictures and in the one posed picture he is not wearing his trademark wire-frame glasses,
though he was wearing them when he was arrested and in his booking photo.
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| No front view picture with glasses like the top left picture shown here appeared in newspapers as Ramsay's arrest for espionage made national and international news in June of 1990 |
In comparing coverage with that of his fellow spy Clyde Lee Conrad, Ohio newspapers wrote local angle stories about Ramsay’s fellow spy Clyde Lee Conrad and even the New York Times wrote one with a dateline of his hometown, Sebring, Ohio.
True, Ramsay and his family were no
longer in Boston, he had been living in Florida for a couple of years, and he went
to boarding school for high school in New York. But Ramsay. admitted having
classified document in his residence in Florida, which means he must have held
them in Boston for some time too before he moved to Floirda too. Given the fact that he had been involved
in espionage activities in at least three countries and two states in the
United States it would normally be incumbent on investigators to release information about an
espionage suspect and ensure that a reasonably accurate picture is disseminated among
the public, most particularly in the most relevant jurisdictions, which in this case would include Boston.
by Kerry Joyce
