Espionage Remains an International Reality, Experts Say : Intelligence: Spying is expected to go on after furor over CIA officer’s arrest abates. Lawmaker says it is for U.S. safety.

The outrage expressed by U.S. officials after the arrest of a top CIA officer on charges of spying for the Kremlin obscures a basic rule of international espionage: The distinction between friends and foes can get fuzzy in the twilight world where intelligence agencies work.

And after the furor surrounding suspected double agent Aldrich H. Ames dies down, officials say, espionage will go on essentially unchanged because that’s the way all sides want it.

“The reality is that we have a lot of experience with friendly countries spying on each other,” said Rep. Julian C. Dixon (D-Los Angeles), a senior member of the House Intelligence Committee.

He added that it would be a big mistake for the United States to agree to stop spying on countries like Russia in exchange for a pledge by them to stop targeting their espionage on Washington.

“We have to do it to protect ourselves,” he said.

In 1992, Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, Yevgeny Primakov, made such an offer, saying that the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, successor to the Soviet KGB, would stop spying against any country “if their intelligence agencies say they will stop their activities in my country.”

The CIA rejected the bargain, according to well-informed sources.

One senior U.S. intelligence official said the United States was not interested in concluding a gentlemen’s agreement with Primakov because “one of them is not a gentleman.”

The charges that the former Soviet Union and then Russia was paying vast sums of money to Ames has produced waves of outrage, especially on Capitol Hill.

Critics say Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government is--at the very least--guilty of ingratitude for accepting U.S. aid to shore up a rickety economy while diverting funds to pay for a CIA mole.

“It’s ironic that, given the high level of assistance that Russia has sought from our nation and other donors, they found this money to pay for their spying,” said Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The Administration needs to assure the American people that U.S. assistance did not, somehow, permit this operation to continue long after Russia should have shut it down on its own.”

Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.) said Saturday that Americans “don’t understand why we give aid on the one hand and allow this to happen on the other. They thought we had a new relationship.”

Dole suggested during an interview on CNN’s “Evans & Novak” program that the right course might be to “suspend the aid for a while and see what happens.”

President Clinton said Friday that he has urged the lawmakers “to resist calls to reduce or suspend our assistance for reform in Russia.”

U.S. aid, he said, “does not flow from a sense of charity or blind faith. Our policy is based on clear American interests clearly pursued.”

For its part, Yeltsin’s government has sought to brazen it out, asserting that espionage is a fact of international life.

Americans like Ames “work for us, our people work for them,” said Mikhail N. Poltoranin, one of Yeltsin’s top advisers. “Intelligence is intelligence.”

Maybe so, but “this would not be the week for Yeltsin to ask for new credits,” said George Carver, former deputy director of the CIA. “But in due course it will quiet down.”

In an interview, Carver said the United States must do everything it can to protect itself from the spies of other countries, whether enemies or friends. But he said it would be useless for Washington to negotiate reciprocal no-spy agreements.

“Any agreements would not be honored,” he said. “We do not live in that kind of world. We may have iron-clad agreements with the French, but that does not prevent them from bugging the hotel rooms of businessmen to discover our industrial secrets. The same goes for the Japanese.

“We don’t need agreements where everybody gets gooey-eyed,” he said. “What we have to do is say if you step on our toe, we’re going to kick you in the shin.”

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dennis DeConcini (D-Ariz.) agreed that counterespionage is essentially a law enforcement problem. Spying is a crime and spies should be caught and punished, he said, adding that the sponsoring government must also pay a price.

DeConcini said governments should examine their intelligence operations to determine whether the information they are getting is worth the risk of exposure. He said the Russians probably did not do that when they decided to put Ames on their payroll.

“Spying is high-risk,” he said. “You only do it when you need to know for your survival. When the Cold War was on and (nuclear) weapons were directed against us, it was very important to know what was going on in the Kremlin.”

He declined to say if the United States maintains spies in Moscow today, but when he was reminded that the nuclear weapons remain in Russian hands and it would be important for the United States to know what Moscow plans to do with the arms, he replied: “Exactly.”

Times staff writers Doyle McManus and Robin Wright contributed to this story.