Telephone Hour

The phones began jangling in the apartments of 23 American employees of the U.S. embassy in Moscow before dawn one day last week. The anonymous callers were usually male, spoke Russian in a threatening tone and delivered nearly identical messages: "I just want you to know that we are tired of our people in New York getting a rough time, and if it doesn't stop, then you are in for trouble." Toward week's end the embassy itself got a call, announcing that a bomb was set to go off in about 20 minutes. Hastily, three floors of the yellow stone building were cleared, but security men found no bomb.

Irritated Relations. The telephone offensive came on top of continuing tension over powerful microwave transmissions penetrating the embassy from Soviet electronic jamming equipment (TIME, Feb. 23). Last week's incidents spurred a formal protest by the State Department to the Soviet government, which promptly denied any involvement. Private citizens in Moscow, however, have no access to the home numbers of American embassy employees.

The Moscow incidents, which recalled a similar wave of harassment in 1971, seemed to be provoked by some anti-Soviet attacks in New York City: a bullet fired at a Russian residence, a bomb blast outside the Aeroflot office and an unexploded bomb found last week in a building housing the Soviet trade organization Amtorg. Though the militantly anti-Soviet Jewish Defense League has been responsible for some earlier outrages against Soviet officials in the U.S., another group called the Jewish Armed Resistance claimed credit, if that is the word, for the Amtorg bomb. While the New York incidents were certainly silly as well as criminal, the Soviet telethon was a new measure of the irritated state of U.S.-Soviet relations.

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