Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/062992/06299930.000

Text File | 1992-09-24 | 9KB | 175 lines

                                                                                ESPIONAGE, Page 58

Still Spying after All These Years


After a spate of spy scandals, Moscow says it is cutting back
on snooping abroad. But is it bluffing, and can the West afford
to drop its guard?

By ADAM ZAGORIN/BRUSSELS -- With reporting by James Carney/
Moscow, William Mader/London and Bruce van Voorst/Washington


    When seven astronauts blasted off aboard the space
shuttle Atlantis from Cape Canaveral earlier this year, they
scarcely imagined that a longtime KGB spy would be among those
waiting to fete their homecoming. But veteran Belgian aerospace
journalist Guido Kindt was on hand in Houston, the site of the
Johnson Space Center, to offer them a hero's welcome. Ostensibly
there to wrap up a deal to ghostwrite the autobiography of the
shuttle's Belgian crew member, Kindt apparently had other
business: he was keeping an eye on the U.S. space program for
his paymasters in Moscow. Once back in Belgium, he and five
others were arrested on espionage charges; Kindt has since
admitted to receiving roughly $140,000 for his 25 years in the
pay of the KGB and its postcommunist foreign-intelligence
successor, the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service).

    Revolution or not, Russia is still in the espionage
business. At a time when Moscow is heavily dependent on the
West's goodwill and financial aid, the pertinacity of Russia's
spies has become a significant irritant between Russia, the U.S.
and several of Washington's allies. Though unlikely to disrupt
discussions on such important matters as arms control, the
continued spying threatens to undermine U.S. support for a
further easing of the cold war-era ban on sales of Western
high-technology goods to Moscow. It could also block the detente
that the Yeltsin administration is seeking between its
foreign-spy agency and the CIA. "One standard of C.I.S. conduct
should be a stand-down on intelligence gathering," argues Paul
Joyal, a former U.S. Senate intelligence committee staff member
who now heads Integer, an information-security consulting firm.
"We can't be expected to invite them to dinner if they steal the
silverware."

    In an apparent attempt to defuse tension over the issue,
Vladimir Lukin, Russia's Ambassador to Washington, has been
advocating a so-called zero-game agreement banning mutual
snooping. At a recent Washington dinner party, Lukin turned to
CIA director Robert Gates and asked, "So when are we going to
get together and make some new rules for spying on each other?"
Even as Washington decries Russian espionage activity, the U.S.
itself continues to snoop. It spent $30 billion on espionage
last year, and recently profoundly irritated Moscow by deploying
the eavesdropping attack submarine U.S.S. Baton Rouge close to
major Russian naval bases.

    In Moscow the SVR has announced that its roster of foreign
agents and domestic personnel will be cut 30% and that the
remainder henceforth will concentrate on economic studies,
background investigations of Western investors and similarly
innocuous tasks. General Vadim Kirpichenko, a KGB veteran who
is a key adviser to the head of the SVR, says the service
intends to behave in a more "civilized" manner and its agents
will eschew blackmail, the use of drugs and other traditional
techniques employed to compromise and recruit foreign agents.

    Does this add up to a new, from-Russia-with-love era?
Hardly. Moscow's Belgian spy ring was blown by a top Russian
diplomat in Brussels who has been singing like a canary to the
CIA since defecting to the West last year; he spilled details
of an elaborate and expanding Russian network based in the
Belgian capital. The case demonstrates the Kremlin's hunger for
foreign military and industrial secrets despite the end of the
cold war. "They would feel absolutely naked without an espionage
service," says a senior British diplomat. "Their innate
suspicion of foreigners demands it."

    True, Western intelligence agencies eager to justify their
budgets may be indulging in some self-serving threat inflation,
but there is little evidence that the SVR is pulling back. FBI
sources, for example, say that this year alone Russian agents
have tried to recruit several U.S. citizens as spies, including
a sailor based at the U.S. Navy's giant Hampton Roads facility
in Norfolk, Va. Wayne Gilbert, the FBI's counterintelligence
chief, complains of a continuing influx of Russian agents
disguised as businessmen and tourists. In the Belgian episode,
SVR spies had targeted a sensitive nato battlefield
communications system. Elsewhere in Europe, the Russians have
shown interest in everything from electronic banking systems to
civilian computer software with potential military applications.

    The collapse of Soviet power has, if anything, magnified
the importance of spying in terms of Russia's security.
Moscow's interest in fomenting coups in the Third World may have
dwindled, but threats from potential adversaries in now
independent republics, each with its own budding intelligence
service, are a growing concern. Fears of foreign spies
infiltrating through the Baltic and Central Asian states have
led Boris Yeltsin to call for strengthening border surveillance.

    Equally important is the need to boost the efficiency of
lagging Russian industry through the acquisition of foreign tech
nology. "As they try to rebuild their economy with even less
money than before," notes Michael Kaser, the director of
Oxford's Institute of Russian and Eastern European Studies, "it
is more important to get free information instead of having to
pay for it." Russia is targeting Western weapons systems, for
example, in order to upgrade its surplus arms, which can then
be sold abroad to earn desperately needed hard currency.

    As a result, the SVR'S foreign tentacles are probing in
many places. Earlier this year, Italian authorities rounded up
28 high-tech spies in what former President Francesco Cossiga
called the largest Soviet network ever uncovered in Europe.
Since the espionage arrests in Belgium, the Dutch government has
expelled four Russians engaged in covert activity, while France,
acting on a tip from the CIA, has uncovered five apparently
unwitting accomplices to the Russian ring that operated out of
Brussels.

    Since German unification, scores of former East German
Stasi spies have been unmasked, but German officials estimate
that about 1,000 are still in place and that about 300 of them
have switched their al legiance to C.I.S. espionage agencies.
Earlier this year, a German employee of the U.S. mission in
Berlin and two former Stasi officers were arrested for belonging
to a spy ring that targeted U.S. Air Force personnel in Europe.
Significantly, one of the ex-Stasi men was already working on
the Kremlin's behalf, according to federal prosecutor Alexander
von Stahl. In Britain senior officials say at least 50 Russian
spies are active in London alone; the government is considering
the expulsion of a number of Russian diplomats.

    Perhaps not surprisingly, Yeltsin's Russian espionage
establishment seems to regard its continued activity abroad as
perfectly normal. All industrial countries engage in spying even
against friends, officials in Moscow assert; moreover, Western
agents continue to snoop after Russian military and space
technologies. Following the discovery of the Russian spy ring
in Belgium, the SVR calmly explained that Russia had, in fact,
been spying. "We can't blame it on anyone else, least of all on
the American counterintelligence service," said an SVR
spokesman. Then, in a highly unusual tip of his hat to a onetime
archenemy, he added, "Let's face it, this is a U.S. success."

    But even as the espionage game continues, Moscow and
Washington are looking warily ahead to cooperation in a variety
of fields. The U.S. would like to acquire information on
extremist groups, such as the murderous Abu Nidal organization,
once supported by communist bloc countries. The Russians could
use assistance in gearing up against potential terrorist threats
from increasingly militant ethnic groups in the former Soviet
empire. Moscow is also in line for advice on how to operate
civilian oversight of intelligence activities in a democracy,
assistance that the CIA is already giving to a number of
ex-Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe.

    Could Russian and American spies really come in from the
cold and help each other? "We have plenty of common enemies,"
notes former CIA director William Colby. "Terrorists, nutty
nationalists, fundamentalists and builders of weapons of mass
destruction." But old habits die hard, and former enemies may
have trouble joining forces, even when their interests coincide.
To many in Washington, the idea of allying with an intelligence
service still aggressively seeking Western technology is
anathema. As well-trained spies know, the cloak of friendship
and cooperation may conceal the dagger of danger and deceit.