‘Bloch Watch’ by Media, FBI Has a Surreal Air

U.S. diplomat Felix S. Bloch, branded a suspected spy for the Soviet Union, slowly turns the pages of an Austrian novel as he sits quietly for three hours on a long park bench on a warm but breezy Washington afternoon.

A couple of journalists sit on the same bench. A television cameraman and sound technician stretch and nap on the bench as well. A half-dozen FBI agents, dressed like college students on a frolic, chat and joke on the other side of the narrow street but keep their eyes on him. A young and curious boy snaps his picture for a souvenir.

What is churning through the mind of the 54-year-old, Vienna-born Bloch? Does he curse his tormentors? Does he bemoan his fate? Or does he simply absorb himself in his book, a novel by Joseph Roth, an Austrian who committed suicide in Paris a half-century ago? No outsider probably will ever know.

A disturbing, surreal air cloaks daily scenes such as this. The violation of a man’s privacy is obvious. The FBI pleads the security of the nation as its excuse. Newspapers and television plead the significance of the story as theirs.

The victim himself does not try to avoid the distasteful surveillance. In a sense, he may be courting it. He could, after all, read inside his apartment. But he seems, in his taciturn, stoic manner, to want the world to know about the violation of his privacy.

An American has to hunt in fiction for a punishment to rival Bloch’s. Perhaps the tale of “The Man Without a Country” comes closest. In the sentimental Edward Everett Hale story, which Bloch might have read as a boy in New York, the anti-hero Philip Nolan is convicted by a naval court-martial of treason and condemned to spend the rest of his life on ships in foreign waters without ever hearing the name of the United States again.

But there is one great difference between Bloch and the fictional Nolan: Bloch has not been convicted of anything.

The case began earlier this year when French agents reportedly videotaped Bloch, director of the State Department office that deals with the European Community, as he handed a small travel bag to a Soviet intelligence agent at the Hotel Meurice Ciga in Paris. After receiving a report from the French, the FBI quickly assigned its own agents to watch Bloch in Washington, hoping to catch him in some act of espionage.

But before they could catch him at anything, Bloch, according to American officials, received a wiretapped call from a Soviet KGB agent who warned him: “A bad virus is going around, and we believe you are infected.” That signaled Bloch that the FBI was on his tail.

With the call, the FBI had no reason to hide anymore. On June 22, FBI agents confronted Bloch with their evidence but failed to inveigle a confession out of him. Bloch reportedly insisted that he knew the Soviet agent only as a fellow stamp collector and denied any espionage.

The State Department, though it continued to pay his salary of almost $80,000 a year, then suspended Bloch from his job, lifted his security clearance and wrenched his nameplate off the door of his office in Washington.

A month later, news of the suspicions about Bloch was leaked to ABC-TV and then confirmed by the State Department. A department spokesman announced officially that Bloch was under investigation by the FBI for “illegal activities” involving “agents of a foreign government.” He is the highest-ranking State Department official ever accused of what sounded like espionage.

The public pronouncements ushered in the epoch of surrealism. Throughout the nation and the world, Bloch was branded as a suspected spy. Whenever he left the confines of the bugged and wiretapped apartment where he and his wife live, he set off a bizarre, carnival-like parade of FBI agents and cameramen and reporters.

The FBI obviously relished the carnival atmosphere of the surveillance. On top of this, officials obviously hoped that Bloch eventually would break under the pressure of so much public glare and confess his sins.

But, so far, Bloch seems to have outwaited most of the press and outwitted the FBI. The FBI, in private, insists that it does not believe Bloch’s stamp collecting alibi. But it is still checking it out.

A kind of ritual orders the watch around Bloch’s apartment building in the fashionable Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, with its embassies and diplomatic residences. More than a dozen FBI agents park outside in aging, nondescript American cars day and night.

“I love it,” said one neighbor recently. “I feel as safe as President Bush.”

This surveillance probably will go on until the FBI somehow gathers enough evidence for a case against Bloch, if the evidence exists; or until his lawyers reach some kind of agreement with the government for Bloch’s immunity from prosecution in exchange for information from him, assuming he has that information. In theory, the present scene could persist for years.

In the beginning of the surveillance, a cluster of jostling reporters and television cameramen followed Bloch wherever he went.

The press, wearying of the Bloch story, has covered his movements only intermittently in the last few weeks. On some days, he actually has walked down the street without a cameraman following him. The television networks, however, still keep messengers on duty to alert them if anything dramatic comes up.

Bloch, leading his white Scottish terrier Mephisto on a leash, stepped out of the front door at 2:30 on a recent afternoon. It was the first time he had emerged that day.

Since Bloch was not wearing walking shoes, his followers knew that no marathon awaited them that day. Wearing a blue checked shirt, gray slacks and brown loafers, he made his way to a nub of a park on Connecticut Avenue. The little park, which stands opposite the Chinese Embassy, harbors a white Goddess of Liberty put up by protesters against Chinese oppression of students in Beijing.

Bloch read from the paperback Roth novel, occasionally consulting a large German dictionary by his side. Sometimes he cupped his chin like Auguste Rodin’s sculpture of “The Thinker”; sometimes he kept his legs crossed in almost rigid relaxation.

Beverley Lumpkin, an ABC News reporter who has probably spoken with Bloch more than any other journalist on the watch, tried to start a conversation with him. But he was in a taciturn mood. He took off his reading glasses, blinked his eyes and muttered something about the Roth novel reflecting “the process of life.” He denied he was feeling depressed but complained of a headache.

But, to most of her questions, he merely nodded, shook his head or shrugged. At 5:30, after three hours on the bench, he arose and walked back to his apartment building, the cameraman in front of him this time, the FBI agents again behind him.

In a quarter of an hour he reached the building and, just before slipping past the front door, said softly to the press and anyone else who could hear: “I’ll be back tomorrow. I don’t know where. I don’t know when.”

Times staff writers Michael Ybarra and Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this report.