Sees Effort to Block Arms Pact : Soviet Official Denies U.S. Embassy ‘Bugging’ Claim

A senior Soviet official denied Wednesday that his government planted electronic listening devices in the new U.S. Embassy building here, and he accused the White House of using a spying incident to block an arms control agreement.

The official, Deputy Foreign Minister Vladimir F. Petrovsky, brushed aside as “dirty inventions” and “groundless claims” charges made Tuesday by President Reagan.

Reagan had said that U.S. diplomats in Moscow will not occupy the new embassy building until it is cleared of listening devices.

Petrovsky told a press conference that the charges appear timed to derail any possibility of an East-West accord when Secretary of State George P. Shultz visits Moscow next week.

Later, confronted by a small group of reporters, Petrovsky specifically denied that Soviet “bugs” had been placed in the new building.

Tass Makes Charges

Tass, the official Soviet news agency, said that Reagan was creating a diversion by ordering Shultz to make the issue of security in Moscow a major item in his talks with Foreign Minister Eduard A. Shevardnadze.

“In other words,” Tass said, “the disarmament problem is being artificially relegated to the background by Washington.”

Petrovsky, despite his sharply critical remarks about Reagan, was far more diplomatic in discussing the three-day visit Shultz is scheduled to begin Monday.

“We attach great importance to it,” he said. “The visit is of major significance.”

Notes Progress on Arms

He said it is no secret that the Soviet Union and the United States are making progress toward resolving major arms control issues.

“It can hardly be considered an accident that such a crucial moment . . . was chosen for (Tuesday’s) series of anti-Soviet pronouncements,” he said.

Petrovsky said that Washington had played similar “low tricks” before, and he recalled the furor in the United States over the Soviet arrest here last September of Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent of the magazine U.S. News & World Report, on charges of spying.

Petrovsksy said the uproar over the Daniloff incident was orchestrated on the eve of the meeting in Iceland of Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

He indicated that the Soviet Union will counter Reagan’s attack with some spy charges of its own. He said that a briefing is planned today on activities of “special services”--Soviet jargon for the CIA and its Western counterparts--directed against Moscow.

Tass, in an article headlined “Washington and its Allies Spy on One Another,” recounted the recent incident in which the American Jonathan Jay Pollard provided secret material to Israel. The news agency said that the United States previously had recruited Israeli citizens to spy on their country.