Sent Home From the Cold

Soviet agents are expelled

Through the dark and cold night, he made his way across the sodden suburban field just outside Washington. The drop was right where it was supposed to be. At the base of a tree, wrapped in a green plastic garbage bag, were eight rolls of undeveloped 35-mm film containing photographs of classified American documents. When he opened the bag, he did not know that the surrounding roads of Montgomery County had been closed or that the FBI was watching. Thus did Lieut. Colonel Yevgeni Barmyantsev, 39, the acting Soviet military attache in Washington, last week become a prominent figure in the growing Western crackdown on Soviet espionage activities.

The FBI spotlighted others as well. FBI Director William Webster announced last Thursday that the bureau had foiled attempts by Barmyantsev and two other Soviet spies to obtain U.S. secrets. Oleg Konstantinov, 33, an intelligence agent serving at the Soviet mission to the U.N., had been picked up by FBI agents in Manhasset, L.I., in the act of attempting to obtain military aerospace secrets from a U.S. citizen operating "under the control of the FBI," in the cautious words of a bureau spokesman. Konstantinov left the U.S. before he was expelled. Another worker at the Soviet U.N. mission, Alexander Mikheyev, 44, was caught trying to persuade Marc Zimmerman, a staff aide to Maine Congresswoman Olympia Snowe, a member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to provide him with classified documents regarding Soviet-American relations. Alerted by Zimmerman in advance, the FBI bugged a conversation over dinner in a restaurant on Capitol Hill, where the Soviet official made his pitch. The State Department ordered Mikheyev to leave the U.S. "expeditiously." Intelligence sources played down speculation that there was a direct link in the three cases and implied that they were not the result of information obtained during debriefings of KGB operatives who recently defected to the West. Nor were the cases a retaliation for the Soviets' highly publicized expulsion last month of Richard Osborne, first secretary of the U.S. embassy in Moscow, the State Department insisted. But one official admitted that the decision to make a show of these three cases was taken "because of the publicity given [by Moscow] to the Osborne expulsion."

Despite denials that the spy crackdown last week was part of a coordinated allied counterspy offensive, there has clearly been a hardening line in the West, as evidenced by the ousting of 47 Soviet agents in France in early April. In recent weeks Britain, Italy and the U.S. seem almost in a uniformly tougher mood. Australia became the latest ally to act, evicting the Soviet embassy's first secretary on Friday for having "threatened Australia's national security." Bill Hayden, Australian Foreign Minister, said that an accumulation of suspicious incidents since the arrival of Valeri Ivanov in 1981 had led the government to conclude that he was a KGB officer. Explained a British diplomatic source in London: "While the expulsions were not part of a concerted policy or operation, each in its turn may be said to reflect the determination of all the Western governments not to tolerate Soviet diplomats engaged in spy activities."

The Kremlin has still not retaliated for France's large crackdown, perhaps because it is anxious to preserve ties with Paris during the East-West propaganda struggle over the basing of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. But Washington expects there will be a return volley against the U.S., probably resulting in the expulsion of a few Americans in a week or so. Western diplomats in Moscow fear that as the list of Soviets being expelled around the world grows longer, the Kremlin will be pushed to react firmly.

Whether or not the counterspy crackdown develops into more than just another symptom of strained Soviet-U.S. relations, it will do little to reduce espionage in the U.S. Of Moscow's 1,000 or so accredited diplomats in the U.S., Edward O'Malley, the head of the FBI'S counterintelligence operations, estimates that at least one-third of them are working for the KGB or Soviet military intelligence. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.