Robert Thompson

Who is Robert Thompson?

Robert Thompson was a U.S. Air Force clerk who confessed in 1965 to passing hundreds of photos of secret documents to the Soviets since 1957 while he was based in West Berlin at the Office of Special Investigation at Tempelhof Air Base. He served there from December 1952 to December 1958.

Thompson was in contact with the Soviet intelligence after he returned to the USA. On 7 June 1963 FBI surveillance watched a personal meeting with a known KGB officer and an individual who later was identified as Thompson.

Thompson was arrested on 7 January 1965 at his service station in Babylon, NY where Thompson was running a home fuel-oil delivery service as a truck driver. He pled guilty and received a 30-year sentence which he served in the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.