France All for Love

It may have been one of the juicier sex-and-spy scandals of recent times, but no one would have known it from the terse announcements of the French government. After the March 16 arrests of five Frenchmen and two women on vague charges of spying for a "foreign power," France last week ordered the expulsion of three Soviet diplomats. The stated reason: "activities unconnected with their mission and status."

The mystery only whetted the appetite of the leftist weekly Liberation. The spy ring, the paper reported, was run by the Soviet deputy air attache in Paris, Valery Konorev, who doubled as an agent for Soviet military intelligence. Among other things, Konorev's gang was reportedly seeking technical information about the rocket engine of the Ariane missile, the % launch vehicle used by the 13-member European Space Agency.

According to Liberation, the Soviet espionage operation got under way in 1985 after Konorev met and seduced a Rumanian woman named Antonetta Manole, who worked at the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies in Rouen, northwest of Paris. She, in turn, allegedly had an affair with her French boss, Pierre Verdier, and brought him into the conspiracy. Verdier later visited Moscow, where he fell in love with a woman named Ludmilla Varygin. The Soviets are said to have agreed to allow Varygin to emigrate to France to marry Verdier, but only if he would provide them with important technical information. That was too much for Manole, the jilted Rumanian, who blew the whistle on the spy ring by writing to Premier Jacques Chirac several months ago.

The Soviet embassy in Paris last week dismissed the entire tale as "pure fantasy," and in Moscow the Foreign Ministry expelled four French diplomats and two French businessmen. The tit-for-tat comes at a bad time: Chirac is due to visit Moscow in May.