Amerikai Magyar Értesítő, 1982 (18. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1982-07-01 / 7-8. szám
1982. jul. aug. a. m. értesítő 19 Diplomats Act Undiplomatically; More Russians Are Ousted as Spies * * # Explanations Include Poland, Afghan War, Carelessness And Simply More Spying By Gkkai.d F. Sum Staff Reporter of Tin: Wai.i. Stkkkt Jiuhnai. WASHINGTON - A most undiplomatic thing is happening to Soviet diplomats. More of them are getting kicked out of host countries. The U.S., for example, recently ousted a top Soviet military officer for obtaining classified information. Canada expelled a Russian official after charging that he offered a businessman "large sums of money” to buy sensitive, restricted technology. Even tiny Singapore recently expelled a Soviet diplomat for posing as a Swedish journalist and trying to buy security information. So far this year, 11 countries have given the heave-ho to 19 Soviet representatives, including a few quasi-official employes of Aeroflot, the U.S.S.R.'s airline. In April alone, six different countries revealed that they had expelled Soviet representatives. Some of the expulsions are handled discreetly; Britain, for example, tossed out a Soviet trade official in February but didn’t announce the action until April. Others are messy. In Indonesia, the expulsion of a Soviet official was marked by an airport brawl between Russian diplomats and Indonesian security aides, one of whom was allegedly bitten by a Russian wife during the scuffle. Thirty Last Year All this hasn’t escaped the watchful eye of the U.S. government, which keeps tabs on the expulsions. The State Department recently compiled a study for American officials showing that 30 Soviet representatives were expelled world wide in 1981, most on espionage charges. The year before, 116 Russians were kicked out-but that number is misleadingly high, because 100 of them were expelled in a single housecleaning by Pakistan. Many more Russians are believed to be expelled quietly, because some host governments don’t want to incite the Kremlin to re- ta iate by kicking their own diplomats out of Moscow. The total number of Soviet expulsions probably is "substantially higher" than is publicly known, the State Department stiidy says. Soviet diplomats have been getting expelled periodically "since the days of Lenin,” the State Department paper notes. And it isn't only the Russians who mix intelligence and diplomacy. It is no secret that the U.S. uses diplomatic jobs as “over” for some of its agents. For their part, the Soviets indignantly insist that nothing unusual is going on. "I have no observation because I’m not aware of the phenomenon you're referring to," says a spokesman for the Soviet embassy here. ‘Sort of a Boomlet’ But while cautioning that nobody has kept records of such things over the years for comparison, most U.S. analysts agree that the number of recent Soviet departures is bigger than usual. "There's sort of a boomlet there," one State Department analyst says. One reason, U.S. experts assert, is that Soviet agents are branching out into new activities. Many of the recently departed Communist diplomats were caught trying to steal sensitive new technology with military uses or participating in "active measures ” like organizing protest movements. Foreign governments now have an eye open for such endeavors. For example, Denmark expelled a Soviet diplomat last October for arranging to have some 150 Danish artists sign an appeal calling for a Nordic nuclear-weapons-free zone, and for supplying money to have the appeal placed as an ad in several newspapers. At about the same time, Egypt was expelling the Soviet ambassador, six other Soviet embassy officials and two Soviet correspondents on charges of trying to foment domestic strife in the country. Some U.S. officials also think the Russians are getting caught more often because they are getting careless as they expand their horizons. One expert points to the case of a high-level Soviet spy expelled from the U.S. in February. In that case, an American double agent arranged to pass on to the Soviets some supposedly secret U.S. documents during a rendezvous in the parking lot of a Virginia shopping mall. FBI men were hiding nearby, waiting for the exchange to take place. When it did, they swooped in, expecting to nab a middle- level Soviet functionary. Instead they caught Vasily I. Chitov, who is a major general in the Red army and, according to the U.S., a top agent for the Soviet military intelligence agency, the GRU. "Why send a general out to do a pickup?" one U.S. official asks. "You send a clerk out to do something like that." Another factor in the recent expulsions may be the chillier international attitude toward the Soviet Union since the Kremlin- backed crackdown in Poland. Expelling a diplomat, and particularly making it known publicly, is often a political protest as much as a counterintelligence action, officials say. Expulsions jumped for a time after the Soviets’ 1979 invasion of Afghanistan, just as they have jumped now. “I think there is a sincere desire on the part of many governments to protest Afghanistan and Poland, and this is one way of doing it,” says a former top U.S. counterintelligence officer. The Representative’s Office U.S. officials also insist that expulsions are rising partly because there are more Soviet spies at work than before. The U.S. estimates that one-third of Moscow's 800 diplomats in this country are actually full-time intelligence officers. One Justice Department aide, Richard Willard, charged in a recent speech that whereas the FBI once was able to “match" hostile intelligence agents one for one in the U.S., the number of foreign agents has grown so much that FBI agents now are outnumbered three or four to one. Many of these pseudodiplomats spend much time snooping around Capitol HiJJ,, which spies regard as a choice spot to ferret out tidbits of Information. In one memorable episode last fall, a Soviet diplomat brazenly walked into the office of Rep. David Emery, a Republican of Maine, and asked for a copy of an alternative plan that the Congressman had drawn up for basing the MX missile. An aide in the office, John Rabb, turned the Russian away. Mr. Rabb says the FBI later told him that the diplomat, an embassy official named Yuri Petrovich Leonov, was a GRU agent. Brouhaha in Jakarta The Indonesian example is another case in which Soviet indiscretion seems to have backfired and created embarrassing publicity. In February, Indonesian security officials caught an assistant Soviet military attache named Lt. Col. S.P. Egorov passing a camera and film to an Indonesian military officer at a Jakarta restaurant. Indonesia gave Col. Egorov 48 hours to clear out but tried to handle the expulsion quietly. Discretion went out the window, though, when he arrived at the airport to leave. He came accompanied by several other Soviet officials, including G.M. Odartouk, a political attache at the embassy, and Alexander Finenko, the head of the local office of the Soviet airline, Aeroflot. Western intelligence officials think Mr. Finenko is more than just an airline bureaucrat; they say he is a top GRU officer. When Mr. Finenko tried to accompany Mr. Egorov to the airplane, Indonesian security officials stopped him. At that point, a scuffle broke out. Indonesian officials said tot Mr. Odariouk, the political attache, hit one airport security guard, while his wife bit, kicked and scratched another. The upshot: Indonesia requested that Mr. Odariouk and Mr. Finenko Join their colleague in returning to Moscow. THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, Monday, June 14, 1982 ******* Notable & Quotable Vice President George Bush before the Notional Public Radio Conference in Washington, D.C., recently: The very first proposal for international control of atomic bombs originated in 1945. It was a proposal written by President Truman's Secretary of War, Henry Stim- son. It resulted in authorized approaches to the Soviet Union and Western allies to seek control over atomic weapons while at the same time pursuing peaceful uses of atomic power for "commercial or humanitarian purposes.” This led to the "Acheson Lilienthal Report," a preliminary report to a plan presented at the United Nations by Bernard Baruch in 1946. The "Baruch Plan" proposed "the creation of an international Atomic Energy Development Authority," to which all aspects of the development and use of atomic energy would have been entrusted. The proposal also called for inspections for violations or potential violations. That proposal was rejected by the Sovi ets. It was rejected at a time when the United States was the only nation armed with atomic weapons-three years prior to the development of the atomic bomb bv the Soviets and eight years before they tested their first hydrogen bomb.
