The Hammer and Sickle Award

THE DAILY FED

The Hammer and Sickle Award

Once honored as a "hero of reinvention" with Vice President Al Gore's Hammer Award, a former Defense Department procurement analyst apparently would have preferred a hammer and sickle.

Theresa Squillacote, a former attorney in the Pentagon's acquisition reform office, was charged Monday with spying for East Germany. Squillacote, her husband and another man, who met in college as leftist activists, were allegedly paid more than $40,000 by East Germany for U.S. government secrets.

Squillacote left the Defense Department in January. She had been recruited by Colleen Preston, former deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition reform, who also retired in January, when they worked together on the staff of the House Armed Services Committee in the early 1990s, The Washington Post reported Tuesday. Last year, Squillacote was awarded a Hammer Award by Vice President Al Gore's National Performance Review for her role in improving Defense procurement processes. Squillacote coordinated the acquisition reform office's legislative initiatives, including its participation in developing the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994.

Before joining the acquisition office, Squillacote was a staff attorney at the Defense Systems Management College, where she received a Meritorious Civilian Service Award for her work. From 1983 to 1990, Squillacote was a staff attorney at the National Labor Relations Board.

Throughout her career, though, Squillacote was working to undermine what she called the "bourgeois parliamentary democracy," according to an FBI affidavit cited in The New York Times. She bemoaned her job at the Pentagon to an undercover FBI agent who was posing as a South African Communist Party official, saying "the weight of the whole five-sided building is on me."

Squillacote allegedly sent photographs to East German agents during her tenure at the National Labor Relations Board. After German reunification, she and her partners tried to get in touch with Soviet officials, and after the Soviet Union disbanded, Squillacote contacted a South African Communist Party official. The FBI then launched an investigation.

Squillacote and her partners are being held without bond on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage.