Tests Disclose ‘Spy Dust’ in Embassy Cars : No Health Risk Seen, but U.S. Will Lodge Protest With Moscow

Scientists who tested the homes, offices and cars of Americans here found traces of a tracking chemical known as “spy dust” in five diplomats’ cars but determined it poses no health risk, the U.S. ambassador said today.

When the United States first announced last August that diplomats had been exposed to the chemical nitropenylpentadienal, or NPPD, State Department spokesman Charles E. Redman said it could be cancer causing.

However, a report released today in Moscow and Washington said the National Institute for Environmental Health found NPPD is not readily absorbed through the skin and will not cause cancer.

Ambassador Arthur A. Hartman, in presenting the report to a news conference of U.S. journalists, said the chemical was found in samples taken in January by an embassy medical technologist.

‘Likely Targets’ Checked

He said the technologist tested cars of embassy employees “considered to be the most likely targets for use of a tracking agent,” but did not identify the employees.

Hartman announced, however, that testing last August and September by the Environmental Protection Agency failed to detect the chemical in hundreds of samples from the homes, offices and cars of the general American community in Moscow and Leningrad.

The embassy claims the chemical allows the Soviets to track people’s movements.

Hartman said some of the samples tested did have traces of the chemical luminol, which the embassy said possibly was used as a tracking agent.

The ambassador described luminol as a widely used, commercially produced chemical that transforms chemical energy into light and is not considered a health hazard.

To Lodge Complaint

Hartman said the State Department in Washington would complain today to the Soviet Embassy about exposing Americans to substances to which Moscow’s general population is not subjected.

When the embassy first announced it had detected NPPD on diplomats last summer, it offered to send an EPA sampling team to the homes and offices of any Americans in the Soviet Union who requested it.

About 500 Americans live in Moscow and about 40 live in Leningrad.

Hartman said about 20% of the Americans asked that their homes and offices be sampled.

The EPA team swabbed 418 frequently touched items, such as telephones, light switches, door knobs and steering wheels, and took 18 samples from clothes dryer lint and vacuum cleaner dust, Hartman said.

He said that when mass spectrometry tests in the United States found no NPPD in the samples he requested further samplings by an embassy medical technologist “to see if indeed it (NPPD) existed.”