Still Spying After All These Years

By ADAM ZAGORIN BRUSSELS

When seven astronauts blasted off aboard the space shuttle Atlantis from Cape Canaveral earlier this year, they scarcely imagined that a longtime KGB spy would be among those waiting to fete their homecoming. But veteran Belgian aerospace journalist Guido Kindt was on hand in Houston, the site of the Johnson Space Center, to offer them a hero's welcome. Ostensibly there to wrap up a deal to ghostwrite the autobiography of the shuttle's Belgian crew member, Kindt apparently had other business: he was keeping an eye on the U.S. space program for his paymasters in Moscow. Once back in Belgium, he and five others were arrested on espionage charges; Kindt has since admitted to receiving roughly $140,000 for his 25 years in the pay of the KGB and its postcommunist foreign-intelligen ce successor, the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service).

Revolution or not, Russia is still in the espionage business. At a time when Moscow is heavily dependent on the West's goodwill and financial aid, the pertinacity of Russia's spies has become a significant irritant between Russia, the U.S. and several of Washington's allies. Though unlikely to disrupt discussions on such important matters as arms control, the continued spying threatens to undermine U.S. support for a further easing of the cold war-era ban on sales of Western high-technology goods to Moscow. It could also block the detente that the Yeltsin administration is seeking between its foreign-spy agency and the CIA. "One standard of C.I.S. conduct should be a stand-down on intelligence gathering," argues Paul Joyal, a former U.S. Senate intelligence committee staff member who now heads Integer, an information-security consulting firm. "We can't be expected to invite them to dinner if they steal the silverware."

In an apparent attempt to defuse tension over the issue, Vladimir Lukin, Russia's Ambassador to Washington, has been advocating a so-called zero-game agreement banning mutual snooping. At a recent Washington dinner party, Lukin turned to CIA director Robert Gates and asked, "So when are we going to get together and make some new rules for spying on each other?" Even as Washington decries Russian espionage activity, the U.S. itself continues to snoop. It spent $30 billion on espionage last year, and recently profoundly irritated Moscow by deploying the eavesdropping attack submarine U.S.S. Baton Rouge close to major Russian naval bases.

In Moscow the SVR has announced that its roster of foreign agents and domestic personnel will be cut 30% and that the remainder henceforth will concentrate on economic studies, background investigations of Western & investors and similarly innocuous tasks. General Vadim Kirpichenko, a KGB veteran who is a key adviser to the head of the SVR, says the service intends to behave in a more "civilized" manner and its agents will eschew blackmail, the use of drugs and other traditional techniques employed to compromise and recruit foreign agents.

Does this add up to a new, from-Russia-with-love era? Hardly. Moscow's Belgian spy ring was blown by a top Russian diplomat in Brussels who has been singing like a canary to the CIA since defecting to the West last year; he spilled details of an elaborate and expanding Russian network based in the Belgian capital. The case demonstrates the Kremlin's hunger for foreign military and industrial secrets despite the end of the cold war. "They would feel absolutely naked without an espionage service," says a senior British diplomat. "Their innate suspicion of foreigners demands it."

True, Western intelligence agencies eager to justify their budgets may be indulging in some self-serving threat inflation, but there is little evidence that the SVR is pulling back. FBI sources, for example, say that this year alone Russian agents have tried to recruit several U.S. citizens as spies, including a sailor based at the U.S. Navy's giant Hampton Roads facility in Norfolk, Va. Wayne Gilbert, the FBI's counterintelligence chief, complains of a continuing influx of Russian agents disguised as businessmen and tourists. In the Belgian episode, SVR spies had targeted a sensitive nato battlefield communications system. Elsewhere in Europe, the Russians have shown interest in everything from electronic banking systems to civilian computer software with potential military applications.

The collapse of Soviet power has, if anything, magnified the importance of spying in terms of Russia's security. Moscow's interest in fomenting coups in the Third World may have dwindled, but threats from potential adversaries in now independent republics, each with its own budding intelligence service, are a growing concern. Fears of foreign spies infiltrating through the Baltic and Central Asian states have led Boris Yeltsin to call for strengthening border surveillance.

Equally important is the need to boost the efficiency of lagging Russian industry through the acquisition of foreign technology. "As they try to rebuild their economy with even less money than before," notes Michael Kaser, the director of Oxford's Institute of Russian and Eastern European Studies, "it is more important to get free information instead of having to pay for it." Russia is targeting Western weapons systems, for example, in order to upgrade its surplus arms, which can then be sold abroad to earn desperately needed hard currency.

As a result, the SVR'S foreign tentacles are probing in many places. Earlier this year, Italian authorities rounded up 28 high-tech spies in what former President Francesco Cossiga called the largest Soviet network ever uncovered in Europe. Since the espionage arrests in Belgium, the Dutch government has expelled four Russians engaged in covert activity, while France, acting on a tip from the CIA, has uncovered five apparently unwitting accomplices to the Russian ring that operated out of Brussels.

Since German unification, scores of former East German Stasi spies have been unmasked, but German officials estimate that about 1,000 are still in place and that about 300 of them have switched their allegiance to C.I.S.espionage agencies. Earlier this year, a German employee of the U.S. mission in Berlin and two former Stasi officers were arrested for belonging to a spy ring that targeted U.S. Air Force personnel in Europe. Significantly, one of the ex- Stasi men was already working on the Kremlin's behalf, according to federal prosecutor Alexander von Stahl. In Britain senior officials say at least 50 Russian spies are active in London alone; the government is considering the expulsion of a number of Russian diplomats.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Yeltsin's Russian espionage establishment seems to regard its continued activity abroad as perfectly normal. All industrial countries engage in spying even against friends, officials in Moscow assert; moreover, Western agents continue to snoop after Russian military and space technologies. Following the discovery of the Russian spy ring in Belgium, the SVR calmly explained that Russia had, in fact, been spying. "We can't blame it on anyone else, least of all on the American counterintelligence service," said an SVR spokesman. Then, in a highly unusual tip of his hat to a onetime archenemy, he added, "Let's face it, this is a U.S. success."

But even as the espionage game continues, Moscow and Washington are looking warily ahead to cooperation in a variety of fields. The U.S. would like to acquire information on extremist groups, such as the murderous Abu Nidal organization, once supported by communist bloc countries. The Russians could use assistance in gearing up against potential terrorist threats from increasingly militant ethnic groups in the former Soviet empire. Moscow is also in line for advice on how to operate civilian oversight of intelligence activities in a democracy, assistance that the CIA is already giving to a number of ex-Soviet bloc countries in Eastern Europe.

Could Russian and American spies really come in from the cold and help each other? "We have plenty of common enemies," notes former CIA director William Colby. "Terrorists, nutty nationalists, fundamentalists and builders of weapons of mass destruction." But old habits die hard, and former enemies may have trouble joining forces, even when their interests coincide. To many in Washington, the idea of allying with an intelligence service still aggressively seeking Western technology is anathema. As well-trained spies know, the cloak of friendship and cooperation may conceal the dagger of danger and deceit.

With reporting by James Carney/Moscow, William Mader/London and Bruce van Voorst/Washington