Pravda Details Exploits of Soviet Who Spied for U.S.

“He might have been the fellow next to you on the subway or in the line for the cinema, as ordinary a Russian as you might find in the Soviet capital, but ‘Donald’ was a spy for the United States--and had been so for nearly 30 years.”

In a tale of both superpower intrigue and human anguish, the Communist Party newspaper Pravda on Sunday recounted the exploits, the motives and the capture and trial of a senior Soviet diplomat now sentenced to death on charges of espionage.

In his long run as a U.S. agent, Donald--the pseudonym given him by his American contacts--caused the Soviet Union enormous damage, according to Pravda. He disclosed much political and economic information, military secrets, including plans for chemical and bacteriological warfare, top Soviet diplomatic codes, preparations for civil defense and criteria for the use of nuclear weapons, it said.

As portrayed by Pravda, Donald was perhaps more highly placed and better informed than any other agent that the United States has had for years in the Soviet government. His role was “most significant,” the paper stressed.

“Having access to many state secrets, Donald sold everything of interest to the U.S. intelligence service,” Pravda said, summarizing his career as an American agent over three decades.

But Pravda, in a virtually unprecedented effort to understand why a Russian would betray his motherland, probed more deeply into Donald’s psychology, refusing to accept him as someone who had simply sold out his country for money or even for ideology.

“How can we explain all this?” Pravda asked at the start of its lengthy article, devoted as much to analysis of the case as to condemnation of the traitor. “What are the sources of his betrayal?

“To explain it all in terms of his being not fully appreciated at his workplace would be naive, although there are such opinions. . . . The situation is not primitive at all. The roots are somewhere very deep. And maybe our ‘tree’ is such because it is supported by such roots.”

Donald appears, from Pravda’s description of him, to be a well-educated, highly trained diplomat or foreign affairs specialist, or possibly a military attache or, even more intriguingly, from the KGB, the Soviet intelligence and security service. Pravda did not disclose his real name, report when he was arrested or convicted or say whether he had already been executed.

He had been recruited by agents of the FBI in 1961 while serving in the Soviet Union’s mission to the United Nations in New York, according to Pravda. Then he was handed over to the CIA, for whom he spied in India and Burma and, most importantly, in Moscow itself, where he had high-level access in the government bureaucracy and through a research institute where he worked.

“One can track political and ideological chance against a background of painful ambition,” Pravda commented. “Somewhere he was misunderstood, and here they are--ambition and love of himself.”

No FBI Comment

In Washington, a spokesman for the FBI refused to comment on the Pravda story. CIA spokesman Bill Devine told the Associated Press that, as a matter of policy, his agency would neither confirm nor deny the Soviet report.

Pravda appears to be cautionary for the most part in publishing the story, but there is the unusual--perhaps unprecedented--suggestion that there may be something wrong in the Soviet system that produces such men as Donald and allows them to function for years without detection, apparently as dedicated officials and patriots.

But the paper also praised KGB Col. Alexander S. Dukhanin, a controversial investigator who was criticized recently by a legislative commission for clearing a regional Communist Party official of corruption charges that might have implicated Yegor K. Ligachev, a member of the party’s ruling Politburo.

His pursuit of Donald, Dukhanin told Pravda, was like the proverbial “search for a needle in a haystack,” and Dukhanin’s critics saw the article as an effort to enhance his reputation and perhaps in doing so protect Ligachev from the vague, never specified charges of corruption.

Quoting the KGB investigators, Pravda suggests that Donald’s weakness was his own arrogance and the thrill he derived from such a dangerous undertaking as spying for the United States through much of the Cold War, including the period of fierce counterespionage campaigns that followed the successful Western penetration of the Soviet military’s command staff in the 1960s.

“I used to live on the razor’s edge and could not imagine another life for myself,” one of his interrogators quotes Donald as saying.

Described by Pravda as “a very self-assured man” who did “not believe in his possible failure,” Donald believed that every move he made was too well thought out, examined and then re-examined for him to be caught.

“I felt it in my spine that the KGB was stepping on my heels,” he told the investigator, “but an analysis of my activity erased all my worries.”

In the end, KGB investigators caught up with him, Pravda reported, through mistakes he made, apparently out of sheer fatigue after nearly 30 years as a spy, in encoding some of his reports for transmission to the American Embassy in Moscow.

Soviet counterintelligence officers had closed in on Donald several times before and even interrogated him, but all along he had “skillfully ruined the mosaic” of evidence against him.

As outlined by Pravda, Donald’s career in espionage was one of remarkable exploits in the heart of the Soviet capital--he sent radio transmissions to the American Embassy from passing trolley buses and left information in secret hiding places, including subway stations, public baths, cafes and hotels, throughout the city.

When he was abroad, his U.S. controllers would contact him through personal advertisements placed in the New York Times, the KGB investigators told Pravda.

According to Pravda, one such advertisement calling on him to make contact and provide promised information said: “Moody--Donald F., please write to us as you promised. Uncle Charles and sister Clara are okay. They want you to write to them. Do not forget about Dave, Doug and their wives. Are you going to travel soon? When? To where? Hope our family will get together again soon. Best wishes from brothers Eduard H. and John F. Closter, N.J.”

Each line, each word in that enigmatic ad in the personal column had a special meaning, Pravda said, but the essence was to remind Donald about plans to communicate with U.S. intelligence wherever he went.

When Donald was transferred to Burma, the U.S. agents placed an ad saying, “Moody--Donald F. I was pleased to learn how lucky you are. See you soon. Everything is fine. John F.”

John F., one of the FBI agents who recruited Donald in New York, arrived in Rangoon, the Burmese capital, a little later and then handed him over to CIA agents who worked with him there, in India and later in Moscow, according to Pravda.