Biggest Spy Swap Imminent, Paper Says : Shcharansky, Others to Be Traded; German Report Not Confirmed

Soviet Jewish dissident Anatoly Shcharansky and an unspecified number of imprisoned Western agents will be swapped for 12 East Bloc spies being held in the West in the biggest such exchange since World War II, the mass-circulation Bild newspaper reported today.

Bonn government spokesman Juergen Findeisen declined to comment on the report, saying, “We do not take a position on such matters.” Officials of the U.S. Embassy here and the U.S. mission in West Berlin were not available for comment.

West German officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, dismissed the report. They said no spy swap negotiations were being held.

In its report, Bild cited “high Soviet sources” as the basis for its report and said that the exchange will take place in the next few days, probably at the Glienicke Bridge, which crosses into East Germany from southwestern West Berlin and which has been the locale for previous spy swaps.

Shcharansky, 37, one of the leading Soviet human rights campaigners of the 1970s, was sentenced in 1978 to 13 years in prison on charges of spying for the United States. Human rights activists in the United States and elsewhere have long sought his release.

According to the Bild report, Washington and Bonn wanted dissident physicist Andrei D. Sakharov, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate living in internal exile in Gorky, to be included in the exchange, but the Soviets refused.

Bild, politically a conservative newspaper, is considered to have contacts with reliable Soviet sources that have used the newspaper in the past to leak accurate information about impending spy exchanges.

The impending exchange, Bild said, results from “months of negotiations” involving Wolfgang Vogel, an East Berlin lawyer who has supervised other exchanges, including that of U.S. spy pilot Francis Gary Powers for Soviet master spy Rudolf Abel in 1962.

The newspaper said that Shcharansky would be the only person released by the Soviets. The others would be freed from prisons in East Europe and the United States, it said.

Bild said the swap would include Soviet agent Yevgeny Zemlyakov, 39, who was sentenced to three years in jail here last September on charges of industrial espionage.

Bild said Lothar-Erwin Lutze, a former clerk in the West German Defense Ministry who was convicted of passing North Atlantic Treaty Organization secrets to East Germany in 1976 and sentenced to 12 years in jail, would also be delivered to the East.