Bonn Finds Soviet Shopping List of West’s Restricted Technology

West Germany has obtained a top-secret Soviet directory of Moscow’s plans to acquire embargoed Western technology ranging from missiles to tractors, the Interior Ministry said Wednesday.

The red book lists the information that Moscow expects its intelligence agents to gather in the West.

Top priority is given to acquiring information on missile guidance systems and microelectronics, large computers, radar and rocket technology and anti-tank and anti-submarine systems, the ministry said in a report.

Soviet agents occasionally referred to the directory as the “book of rare and endangered species . . . because so many of the technologies it describes are jealously guarded by their Western producers,” the ministry said.

Criticized Embargo The report coincides with a visit to West Germany by Soviet Deputy Premier Alexei K. Antonov, who has criticized the Western embargo on exports of strategically sensitive goods to the Soviet Bloc.

Antonov, who on Tuesday ended two days of trade talks in Bonn, said the embargo, drawn up in the so-called Cocom list, was a brake on bilateral trade with West Germany, Moscow’s biggest Western trading partner.

Cocom, the Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls, is a Paris-based group set up by the Western allies in 1949 to prevent the export of sensitive material to the East Bloc.

An Interior Ministry spokesman denied that publication of the report was timed to coincide with the visit by Antonov, who on Wednesday was touring West German industrial firms.

But sources at the Economics Ministry, which led the German side at the trade talks with Antonov, said the timing was neither sensible nor particularly helpful.

The Interior Ministry said the Soviet directory, obtained by West German security agents, was officially entitled “Coordinated Demands for Technological Information Tasks.”

It was kept under lock and key in a special room in Soviet diplomatic and trade missions, it added.

The book has 27 chapters, 26 dealing with special technological areas and the 27th telling Soviet agents “how to get around or exploit laws, regulations and trade practices in the Western host country,” the report said.

Chapter 14, on agricultural machinery, asks agents to acquire “apparently harmless” details of farm tractor hydraulic transmission systems, which the Interior Ministry said could be used in the development of Soviet armored vehicles.

The report said each Soviet agent was expected to fulfill four “contracts” a year from the directory and could expect great personal prestige and rapid promotion if he did so.

The ministry warned that Western-based companies doing business with Eastern European Communist states were increasingly being used by the Soviet Bloc to acquire embargoed strategic goods.