CIA Using ‘Spy Dust’ to Wreck Summit, Izvestia Says

The Soviet government newspaper Izvestia accused the CIA on Friday of promoting charges that the KGB secret police used a dangerous chemical dust to track the movements of American diplomats here.

Izvestia said the United States was apparently trying to torpedo the scheduled Soviet-American summit meeting in Geneva in November by airing the “spy dust” charges.

“It seems that some people in the United States are very much against a normalization of Soviet-American relations,” the article said.

“The issue of the U.S. Administration’s own stance emerges in this connection,” Izvestia said. “What does it strive to achieve by encouraging those who seek to complicate further these relations?”

It added that Washington’s charge that the KGB used a synthetic yellow powder to trace diplomatic movements in Moscow was a “sleazy and absurd provocation.” And it said that the CIA launched a new anti-Soviet provocation to cover up its own failures in intelligence work.

Izvestia called State Department charges against Moscow reminiscent of “science fiction.”

In a related matter, the American Foreign Service Assn., which represents diplomats in dealings with the State Department, said the discovery of the chemical dust should be compensated by greater hardship pay for American staffers in the Soviet Union.

The group has sent a letter to the department, requesting that the hardship differential for U.S. personnel in Moscow and Leningrad be raised from the present 20% of base pay to 25%.