TAMPA, Florida (AP) - Jurors saw a recording of a former top Army officer telling an undercover agent that he had betrayed U.S. secrets because his allegiance was elsewhere.

The conversation, played in court Tuesday, was contained in a secretly recorded videotape submitted as evidence in the trial of George Trofimoff, the highest-ranking U.S. military man charged with espionage.

"In my soul I am Russian, I am not American," Trofimoff said in Russian to an FBI agent posing as a Russian Embassy official.

Trofimoff, a retired Army reserve colonel and the former head of an Army interrogation center, is accused of sneaking copies of tens of thousands of pages of secret Army intelligence reports to the KGB during a Cold War spying career.

He denies the allegation, and his defense attorney has told jurors that Trofimoff made up the spy tales to collect money the undercover agent had offered in exchange for information.

In the sixth day of testimony in his federal trial, jurors heard the 74-year-old retiree recount meetings with KGB agents in Germany and Austria.

Trofimoff, the German-born son of Russian emigres, told the agent that he was raised as a Russian, educated by Russian teachers and spent his summers as a youth in a Russian scouting troop.

At one point, Trofimoff broke out into a Russian song. The FBI agent, Dimitry Droujinsky, chimed in.

"Of course, the money helped," Trofimoff later told Droujinsky. "But foremost I am doing this for the motherland."

Trofimoff was lured to the hotel room near his Melbourne home under the ruse that a former KGB analyst had disappeared with information implicating Trofimoff as a spy.

Droujinsky, in hours of detailed questions, prodded Trofimoff's long recounting of a spy career prosecutors say spanned the Cold War.

Trofimoff told the agent he was recruited by another Russian man, Igor Vladimirovich Susemihl, whom he considered a brother.

Trofimoff came to the United States after World War II and became a U.S. citizen after he joined the Army in the 1960s.

Susemihl became a high-ranking official in the Russian Orthodox church in Vienna, Austria. The two lost touch during World War II, but resumed their close relationship when Trofimoff returned to Germany.

Trofimoff told the FBI agent Susemihl arranged for him to begin supplying the Soviets with information after he was promoted as head of the interrogation center in Nuremberg, Germany.

The two were arrested in Germany in 1994 on spying charges. They were freed when a judge ruled the statute of limitations on the crime had expired. Trofimoff was fired from his civilian job in the Army the day after his arrest.

Susemihl died in 1999, shortly after Trofimoff and the agent's meetings took place.

Jurors heard that it was Trofimoff's money problems that paved the way for the espionage. Trofimoff's salary from the Army didn't go far in Germany, and he was burdened with a costly divorce, mortgages and his children's education.

Trofimoff told the agent he received a $2,500 a month stipend from the KGB and occasionally received extra payments that were the equivalent of thousands of dollars. Whenever he needed money, he asked Susemihl, who would provide it, Trofimoff said.

Trofimoff said he met with KGB agents on several occasions, but never more than once a year.

He gave them photographs of the pages of secret information the Army routinely sent the interrogation center. He produced so much information for the KGB that Trofimoff told the agent he wasn't sure what secrets he'd given away.

"In many instances, I didn't even know what I had," Trofimoff told the agent. "I had no time to read it."

Trofimoff bragged to the agent he'd been awarded a Soviet medal for his contribution, and Droujinsky assured Trofimoff the material he'd provided made its way to the highest level of the government.

Trofimoff told the agent he last worked for the KGB in 1987. After Communist regimes in Eastern Europe began to fail, the KGB was no longer interested in the information that came through the center, whose job was to debrief refugees and defectors from Communist countries.

"I hope you are not doing (this) to put me in a difficult position, no?" Trofimoff asked the agent at one point.

"No, we are doing this to help you and help us," Droujinsky answered.

Testimony will continue Wednesday.