Dust Won’t Settle

For a decade or more, according to U.S. officials, the Soviet secret police have exposed American diplomats in Moscow to a chemical agent that provides a means for tracing their movements. In the last few months a marked increase has been noted in the use of the little-known chemical powder--nitrophenylpentadiene, or NPPD. Now there are indications that Americans and possibly other foreigners who have no government connection--journalists, businessmen, students and the like--have also been exposed to the “spy dust.”

Only weeks ago, the State Department says, was it learned that NPPD is a mutagen--a substance capable of causing genetic damage and, possibly, cancer. Information on NPPD is scarce. Scientific literature contains only seven references to it, six of them of Soviet origin. It is because the health risks of the chemical have only lately come to light that the U.S. government has chosen to go public with the NPPD story and strongly protest its use to Moscow.

It is hardly a secret that the Soviet Union and the United States both devote considerable resources to spying and counterespionage activities. Intelligence agents accept risk as part of their job. It is a far different matter, though, when ordinary embassy employees, their families and private American citizens and their families, as well as Soviet citizens, are indiscriminately exposed to health perils. To do that is an outrage that goes beyond the unwritten rules of the game.

The real target in all this may well be not so much Americans as Russians who meet with Americans. By following NPPD traces that are invisible to the eye but discernible under a certain light, the secret police have an added opportunity to identify potential dissidents and gather evidence against them. That the Soviet regime distrusts its own citizens and denies them such basic rights as freedom of movement and association is an old story. The chemical-monitoring technique is one of the more sordid episodes in that story.