Soviets Expel U.S. Military Aide as Spy in Tit for Tat With Washington

The Soviet Union shot back in an espionage war with Washington today, ordering a U.S. military attache expelled and saying the atmosphere of “spy mania” bodes ill for relations with the Bush Administration.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady I. Gerasimov said that Army Lt. Col. Daniel Francis Van Gundy III, an assistant military attache at the U.S. Embassy, is a spy and that he must leave the country in 48 hours.

Gerasimov said Moscow was responding to Washington’s expulsion last week of a Soviet military attache it accused of trying to buy computer secrets.

First in 2 1/2 Years

Van Gundy’s ouster was the first Soviet expulsion of a U.S. diplomat in almost 2 1/2 years, a period in which superpower relations have markedly improved.

It clouded relations with the Bush Administration even before the President, who took office in January, announced the results of a review of American policy toward the Soviet Union.

“The U.S. Administration is revealing its foreign policy, and we have this problem of spy mania,” Gerasimov told reporters.

He cited a recent Time magazine cover story on the 1987 Marine spy scandal at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and said American leaders uninterested in improving relations had tried to incite fears of espionage.

“We’re not the ones who initiated this process,” Gerasimov said, tacitly acknowledging the connection between last week’s incident and the expulsion of Van Gundy. “It does not fit in with the trend for the positive development of Soviet-American relations.”

Van Gundy, 42, of Marina, Calif., had served in Moscow nearly two years, the normal diplomatic tour.

He had been expecting the expulsion order since the State Department last Thursday ordered Soviet Lt. Col. Yuri N. Pakhtusov to leave the United States. Van Gundy held the same military rank and occupied the same diplomatic post in the Moscow Embassy as Pakhtusov did in Washington.

Van Gundy, who lived on the U.S. Embassy compound with his wife, Susan, and two of their three daughters, declined to answer reporters’ questions.

Gerasimov, speaking at the Foreign Ministry Press Center, charged that Van Gundy attempted “to enter a closed area, deliberately diverting from the officially permitted route, clandestinely photographed military sites and committed other gross violations” of the rules of diplomatic conduct. “Warnings had already been issued to the lieutenant colonel,” he said.

In Washington, a State Department spokeswoman, Anita Stockman, said without elaborating that U.S. officials are “considering our response.”

Pakhtusov was accused of receiving sensitive information about how the U.S. government protects computer secrets. The State Department said he was caught in a six-month FBI probe after he approached an unidentified American employee of a firm that deals in classified information.

Gerasimov said the expulsion of Pakhtusov was “an artificially cooked scenario clumsily carried out by the FBI.”