The Honorable Schoolboy

An FBI effort to recruit by blackmail backfires

For years intelligence operatives in Moscow and Washington have tended to regard "peaceful coexistence," and more recently detente, as a continuation of the cold war by other means. Spies have used the proliferation of official contacts between East and West to move back and forth, and counterspies have reacted accordingly. Ever since a Soviet-American student exchange program was established in 1958, the FBI, which is responsible for counterespionage in the U.S., has been on the lookout for agents of the Soviet secret police, or KGB, operating undercover as visiting students and scholars.

Earlier this year the FBI botched an attempt to blackmail a Soviet student into becoming an informant. Soviet and American officials have tried to prevent publicity, but TIME has learned that the incident provoked protests from the Soviet embassy in Washington and generated tensions between the FBI and State Department that are still unresolved.

The target of the FBI operation was Andrei Robertovich Lusis, 37, a postdoctoral exchange student who did research on metal oxides in the physics department at Cornell University during the 1976-77 academic year. Lusis' age made him suspect to the FBI: Wasn't he a little old to be just another schoolboy? the bureau asked itself. Perhaps his studies back in the U.S.S.R. had included microphotography and other spooky skills at a special KGB training center. The bureau placed him under surveillance.

In April, the FBI learned that Lusis planned to visit three other Soviet students at their apartment near Boston College. Living near by was a Boston College graduate student, a woman in her 20s, who had taken on assignments for the bureau on a part-time basis. FBI field agents asked her to get to know Lusis and his companions in hopes of obtaining information. She got to know one of the students and joined the group for a drink, then stayed with the party as it moved to another apartment, where more liquor was served.

According to the woman, some time during that evening she was drugged, and woke up naked in bed with Lusis, who was trying to rape her. She claims that she pushed him away, got dressed, ran out of the apartment and reported the attempted rape to her FBI superiors.

At this point, the FBI field office in Boston turned the case over to bureau headquarters in Washington. James Adams, assistant to lame-duck Director Clarence Kelley, was responsible for the decision to recruit Lusis as an agent or, if it turned out he was already working for the KGB, to "turn" him, through blackmail, into a double agent. Routinely, the agency notified the State Department of its plans.

The State Department, which had objected to FBI tactics in the past, was particularly displeased by the timing of the Lusis case. Soviet-American relations were deteriorating dangerously. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and his advisers were regrouping after their disastrous week in Moscow in March and preparing to meet Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Geneva in May. The U.S.S.R. desk at State argued strenuously that the FBI'S proposed blackmail attempt threatened to jeopardize Soviet-American relations at the worst possible time. The CIA supported State, noting it had nothing in its files to indicate Lusis was a KGB "heavy." But, exercising its license to conduct domestic counterespionage, the FBI decided to go ahead anyway.

Agents confronted Lusis with the woman's accusation of attempted rape.

He was in deep trouble, they warned; he faced criminal charges in the U.S. and disgrace, possibly punishment, back in the U.S.S.R. But, if he became an informant about Soviet activities in the U.S. and continued to cooperate with American intelligence when he returned home, the affair could be hushed up.

In this case, at least, the schoolboy remained honorable. He reported the FBI's threat to the Soviet embassy in Washington, which in turn protested to the State Department. Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher complained to the White House about the FBI'S disregard of the State Department, and Joseph Duffey, then Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, took the matter up with Vice President Walter Mondale. At least one indignant official accused FBI hard-liners of deliberately trying to sabotage detente. Much more likely, FBI bureaucrats were stubbornly, and ham-handedly, doing what they considered to be their job.

One upshot: the incident contributed to the establishment of a high-level interagency committee to coordinate all Government initiatives that might affect U.S.-Soviet relations. No further attempts were made to recruit Lusis, and he returned to the U.S.S.R. in June. But the running feud still goes on between the State Department and the FBI over whether Soviet exchange students should be fair game for recruitment attempts. Vance and Zbigniew Brzezinski have discussed the possibility of new policy guidelines to govern FBI counterespionage operations.

While relatively few cases come to light, such incidents are quite common on both sides. Just how common became clear last month, when the U.S. sharply protested a crude attempt by the KGB to blackmail a Polish-born American diplomat, Constantine Warvariv, 53, using prefabricated evidence of wartime collaboration with the Nazis. Some State Department officials, still furious about the Lusis case, suspect the attempted blackmail of Warvariv was a Soviet retaliation for the schoolboy affair. More likely, the two incidents were unrelated, except as twin pieces of evidence that spooks will be spooks, it seems, regardless of the initials under which they operate.

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