Embassy Officer Said to Admit to Spying : Espionage: FBI says in an affidavit that the U.S. employee in Athens confessed to selling secrets to Greek military source. The allegation is denied.

A communications officer at the U.S. Embassy in Athens has admitted that he sold a Greek military officer 240 classified documents, including a U.S. assessment of Greece’s intentions toward the former Yugoslavia, the FBI said in an affidavit made public Wednesday.

The embassy employee, Steven John Lalas, 40, of Dover, N. H., has worked for the State Department for 10 years. He was ordered held without bond on charges of espionage conspiracy.

The FBI affidavit provided unusual detail on how authorities learned of the alleged spying and what steps they took to counter it.

Lalas’ lawyer, John K. Zwerling, said that his client would plead not guilty and contended he was being treated “like he had given the secrets of the atomic bomb to Russia during the Cold War.” He denied that Lalas had admitted guilt and he unsuccessfully sought a court order requiring the government to provide any recordings or notes of his client’s questioning.

During interviews by FBI agents over a two-day period, Lalas admitted that he had sold classified information to the Greek officer for more than $20,000 over a two-year period, John J. Quattrocki, an FBI counterintelligence agent, said in the affidavit.

Quattrocki quoted Lalas as saying: “I know I’ve broken the law. I know I have to be punished. I know I could get 20 years.”

Zwerling denied that Lalas made the statements.

In the interviews, conducted April 29 and 30 at a Rosslyn, Va., motel across the Potomac River from Washington, Lalas identified documents classified “secret” or “confidential” that he passed to the Greek official, Quattrocki said.

The documents, in addition to those related to Yugoslavia, dealt with plans and readiness for U.S. military strategy in the Balkans and material on Turkey, Cyprus and Macedonia, Quattrocki said.

Greek officials in Athens said Wednesday that they were “totally unaware of the matter.”

An FBI spokesman said the identity of the Greek military officer who allegedly sought the information has been established, but he declined to provide the name. After Wednesday’s hearing, Nikos Papaconstantinous, press counselor for Greece’s embassy here, did not return a telephone call.

Quattrocki said that Lalas had been observed on a secret closed-circuit television at the embassy taking documents from a receptacle for classified material destined for shredding and marking and trimming their edges to fit in his pockets. On all but one occasion during the one-week of television monitoring, which ended April 26, Lalas was alone in the embassy’s communication programs unit, usually after 8 p.m.

“Based on my training and experience, I believed these actions to be consistent with espionage tradecraft and tasking by a professional foreign intelligence officer,” Quattrocki said.

The government first learned of the alleged spying in February, when an unidentified official of the Greek Embassy here made a statement to a State Department officer indicating the Greek official knew the contents of a “secret” communication from the U.S. Embassy in Athens to the State Department, the FBI affidavit said.

By reviewing the “in-out logs” of the seven secure communications officers at the embassy, investigators found that Lalas was in the communication unit after hours and on weekends at times he was not scheduled to work.

During questioning, Lalas said that in April, 1991, four months after he was assigned to the embassy, he was approached by someone identifying himself as a Greek military official who subsequently offered to pay for documents from the embassy, the FBI said. Lalas maintained that he agreed to the scheme initially “out of fear for the safety of his family living in Greece,” the affidavit said.

But later, according to the FBI, Lalas conceded that he did not report the Greek military officer’s approach because he knew it was against the law to have disclosed classified information.