Reforms in Soviet Union Only Increase Appetites for Secrets From the West

The sobering message of the Felix S. Bloch affair is that despite the reforms of Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Soviet spying against the United States will continue with intensity for a long time to come.

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that improved political relations will reduce Soviet espionage. Ironically, glasnost and perestroika are actually increasing the incentives for Soviet intelligence to probe, recruit and steal.

Why? Every nation seeks inside information about political decisions being made by its potential adversary that could affect national security. This is a constant.

Every nation also needs to know the technical specifications of its adversary’s weapons in order to design effective countermeasures. Another constant.

Finally--and this is particular to the Soviet Union--the continuing decline of the Soviet economy forces Moscow to engage in heavy industrial espionage in Western Europe, Japan and the United States in an effort to catch up. The demand is heightened by Gorbachev’s openness, which affords millions of Soviets a chance to travel abroad and hundreds of millions of television viewers to see how much better people in the West live. Soviet leaders are under intense pressure for quick improvements in the consumer economy.

No one should be surprised that the KGB tries to recruit (and will continue to do so) Americans with access to top-secret information and high technology. During times of good superpower relations, Americans who are frustrated or greedy--or both--may actually believe that a little work for the Soviets will do little harm to the United States.

The question before us today is how to keep these tendencies under control.

Improving counterintelligence capabilities at home is feasible. But as this happens, there will be a tendency for the espionage flow to move abroad, where it is more difficult to monitor.

Handing over secret materials in foreign cities like Vienna or Cape Town is one increasingly popular method of evading the FBI. The Soviets maintain a large embassy in Mexico City. In the past, it has been a crucial place for scooping up American secrets such as those about an advanced U.S. communications satellite passed on by Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee.

Another ruse that will become more important is the use of third-country nationals--not just Soviet-Bloc citizens like East Germans and Bulgarians but citizens of Atlantic Alliance countries--to get at American secrets. Thus we see the involvement of a Turkish citizen in the recent trial of American James Hall, who was court-martialed in March on espionage charges.

Over the last 10 years, tens of thousand of Soviet citizens have immigrated to the United States and now a considerable number are coming as tourists, scientists, sailors. Undoubtedly, the KGB has planted a few agents among them. Will we wake up one day to find that one of our military attaches in Moscow has been slipping secrets to the KGB because he or she was recruited as a cadet by an emigre Russian teacher of the opposite sex at one of our military academies?

American counterintelligence is going to need help, specifically:

--Better cooperation--including more expertise, both technical and human--between the FBI and CIA in catching spies at home.

--Increased coordination with counterintelligence organizations of NATO countries and Mexico.

--A bit of common sense by scientists and employees in high-tech and defense industries who have good reason to suspect something is amiss. Nobody wants to turn America into an informer society but a little awareness in libraries and elsewhere is desirable.

--Tips by intelligence defectors.

--And, of course, tips from the spies we have recruited ourselves--and will continue to recruit--within the Soviet Establishment, including the KGB.

Sad but true: In these sunnier days of Soviet-American relations, the spy wars go on.