A Strange Spy Story

Did Felix Bloch, a Foreign Service officer for 30 years and former deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, pass sensitive information to a Soviet agent in Paris earlier this year? Did he provide Austrian officials with classified information about an American investigation into the Nazi past of Austrian President Kurt Waldheim? Was he warned in a coded message from a Soviet operative in Washington last month that he was under FBI surveillance, thus effectively ending hopes that he might be caught in an incriminating act? All these allegations and more have been reported and speculated on. President Bush says he has been briefed on them, and describes them as “very serious” if true. Yet for all the public notice given this matter Bloch remains charged with nothing. He has not even been taken into custody.

The Bloch case is one that has obvious potentially serious implications, but one that also seems for now to hang on thin legal threads. Bloch was suspended with pay from his State Department job after he refused to cooperate with security officials. That was more than a month ago. Since then no further legal measures have been taken against him. Yet he and his family remain under highly visible and intense public scrutiny, their home staked out, their every move monitored by government agents and television camera crews. Bloch cannot walk his dog without a convoy of FBI cars revving up and setting off in low-speed pursuit. By one account, at least seven FBI cars, each carrying a couple of agents, keep constant watch on Bloch. That is a considerable allocation of resources, at considerable expense. To what end?

The effort appears to have been mounted in hope of (1) putting Bloch under enough psychological pressure so that he will break down and tell all, or (2) spooking him into trying to flee the country, an act that could be taken as a presumptive sign that he has something illegal to hide and lead to his arrest. The apparent reasons for these extraordinary measures is that the government has little hard evidence gainst Bloch. It does have a videotape that shows a known Soviet agent who was being shadowed in Paris meeting with Bloch, who gave him a briefcase; until that point, it seems, Bloch himself had not fallen under suspicion. Handing over a briefcase to a KGB agent is an act that raises the gravest of suspicions. The problem is apparently that U.S. officials don’t know whether the briefcase contained state secrets, dirty laundry or nothing at all, and Bloch isn’t saying. That silence was enough to get him placed on administrative leave. It’s not enough to get him arrested, let alone charged and convicted.

So the deliberately high-profile game of surveillance goes on, trusting that somehow a break will occur. Officially the surveillance is justified as part of a continuing security investigation. The troubling question is at what point does a legitimate investigation cross the line to become harassment, and under what conditions are the civil rights of a suspect and his family--among them the right to privacy--improperly violated by the state? These aren’t easy questions to answer. That they need to be asked is a further sign that this has been one of the odder national security investigations in recent memory and, given the manner of its unfolding, one of the more disturbing.