KGB Urged Her to Kiss and Tell, Defector Says

As a young translator for the Soviet government travel agency Intourist, Alexandra Costa was encouraged to flirt with foreign visitors, and “if a relationship developed, the KGB wanted to guide it.”

“One of the conditions of the job was that I was to report to the KGB,” Costa said.

“I was seeing one of the British guys, but nothing really developed,” she said in an interview this week. However, “one of the other girls fell in love with a British man,” and the KGB wanted to run her as a “swallow,” or seductress.

“My KGB handler complained that ‘the wrong girl fell in love. She won’t talk to us.’ ”

The woman ended up marrying the man and moving to England, said Costa, who defected from the Soviet Embassy in Washington in 1978 and now works as a computer consultant in the Washington area.

‘Most People Cooperate’

The woman who refused to cooperate was an exception, Costa said. “Most people don’t refuse to cooperate with the KGB. The state owns everything, and if you want a job or an apartment, you play the game.”

The game is often the “honey trap,” the oldest trick in the book of espionage, one that diplomats, businessmen and journalists are warned to avoid in the Soviet Union, but one into which many tumble nonetheless.

Official Washington reacted with outrage to revelations that at least three Marines allegedly traded sex for secrets at U.S. diplomatic missions in Moscow and Leningrad.

But over the last few decades, a British, a French and a Canadian ambassador and an American and a French military attache are among those known to have fallen into variations of the same snare.

Costa estimated that about half the Soviet employees at any Western embassy are full-time KGB operatives, and the rest cooperate.

The KGB bugs the homes and offices of Westerners, and can spot a shaky marriage, an alcohol problem, “someone with a big ego, or someone who looks too often at a pretty girl’s legs,” Costa said.