U.S. Orders Expulsion of 55 Soviet Diplomats : Largest Single Ouster Affects Capital, S.F.

The United States on Tuesday ordered 55 Soviet diplomats in Washington and San Francisco to leave the country and barred the Kremlin from filling another 19 vacancies in those cities, potentially elevating a longtime dispute over Soviet spying into a serious breach in superpower relations.

The action, approved Monday by President Reagan and announced by the State Department, is the largest single expulsion of foreign diplomatic personnel ever ordered by this country. State Department spokesman Charles Redman said that most of the 55 Soviets were expelled for activities “incompatible with their diplomatic status,” a euphemism for spying.

Parity in Numbers

When completed Nov. 1, the expulsions will leave the Soviet Embassy in Washington with 225 Soviet nationals and its San Francisco consulate with 26--the same numbers as there are American nationals in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and the consulate in Leningrad.

The expulsion order is the latest gambit in a prolonged diplomatic give and take: The United States accused a Soviet U.N. employee of spying, then tried and released him and ousted 25 Soviet diplomats at the Kremlin’s U.N. Mission; the Soviet Union jailed an American reporter on espionage charges, then released him, and on Sunday ordered five U.S. diplomats to leave.

Redman said the Soviets had been explicitly told that a move against American diplomats such as Sunday’s expulsion order would cause the United States to cut the Soviet diplomatic presence here to U.S. levels in the Soviet Union.

Five of the 55 Soviets, Redman said, were ordered out in direct retaliation for Sunday’s Soviet expulsion of the five diplomats. The Soviets will be allowed to replace those workers later.

Required by Law

The expulsions of the remaining 50 Soviets and the barring of replacements for the 19 vacant posts were aimed at bringing American and Soviet diplomatic corps into parity as required by a 1985 act of Congress and therefore “no retaliation would be justified,” Redman said.

He and White House spokesman Larry Speakes asserted that the action should not hinder pursuit of a nuclear arms reduction accord, as discussed at this month’s summit in Iceland, or other normal relations.

Asked whether the Soviets would retaliate with more expulsions of U.S. diplomats, Speakes replied: “We’ll see. We hope they won’t.”

But Dimitri Simes, a Soviet emigre who is now a senior associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, commented: “I think they (the Soviets) will be very strongly tempted to throw out a large number of people. I don’t know if it will be 55 but I would be very surprised if it was only five or 10. (Soviet leader Mikhail S.) Gorbachev will interpret it as a test of wills.”

Indeed, the Soviets, clearly angered by the instant one-fifth reduction in their U.S. staff of 320 nationals, made it clear that they will take revenge.

Shortly before the expulsion order was issued, Gennady I. Gerasimov, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman, warned in Moscow, “If the American side insists on continuing this game of tit for tat, this could go on to infinity.”

The official Soviet news agency Tass later said that the White House “took the next step in worsening Soviet-American relations.” A spokesman at the Washington embassy said a response from Moscow “can come today, it can come tomorrow. But I think it is most probable tomorrow or the day after.”

At the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, Vice Consul Gennady German told reporters that the expulsion order is “unfair,” then left abruptly for lunch.

Redman released the names of the five Soviet diplomats who were expelled in retaliation for Sunday’s Soviet action but did not give out the names of the other 50 diplomats to be expelled nor specify the 19 positions that will not be filled. The expulsions should still permit the Soviets to conduct normal embassy and consulate operations here, he said.

Outsized Impact

But they nevertheless may have an outsized impact on Soviet operations, several experts said, because the Soviets prefer to bring over their own citizens to be cooks, drivers and other domestic help. U.S. diplomats in Moscow and Leningrad employ about 200 Soviet nationals for such tasks.

When the the expulsion order is fully implemented, the Soviet Embassy in Washington will end up with 42 fewer staff members and the San Francisco consulate will be down to 26 from 38. Of the 19 vacant positions that the Soviet will not be allowed to fill, 17 are in Washington and two in San Francisco.

Tuesday’s action was the largest of a series of expulsions and other diplomatic insults that have dogged superpower relations since last summer, when a series of Soviet spy arrests inflamed American political sentiment against the Soviets.

Congress last fall passed legislation ordering the Administration to draft plans to achieve parity between the American and Soviet diplomatic staffs, but set no deadline for reaching that goal. In March, the Administration accused the Soviets of larding their U.N. mission with spies and ordered 25 mission employees to leave by Oct. 1.

The dispute festered in September after the FBI arrested on espionage charges Gennady F. Zakharov, a physicist employed by by the U.N. mission. The Soviets then seized U.S. reporter Nicholas Daniloff on apparently trumped-up spy charges, causing a furor that nearly derailed plans for a summit.

That snarl ended with a swap of Zakharov for Daniloff and Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov, but not before the White House angered the Soviets by singling out by name the 25 Soviet U.N. Mission diplomats for expulsion.

The Soviets vowed to bring the U.N. matter up at the Iceland summit but never did. And, when the last five of the Soviet diplomats at the U.N. mission left New York last week, the Soviets struck back--as they had promised--by ordering five U.S. diplomats out of the country.

The size of Tuesday’s expulsion caught many experts by surprise, but Redman and others noted that the United States merely accomplished in one sweeping move the equality in diplomatic staffs that Congress had mandated last year.

Times staff writers Dan Morain, in San Francisco, and Robert Shogan, in Washington, contributed to this story.