Russia Strikes Back at U.S., Expels Diplomat

In Russia’s first diplomatic tiff with Washington since the Cold War’s end, Moscow expelled a senior American diplomat Monday in retaliation for last week’s ouster of a Russian envoy from the United States.

The Russian Foreign Ministry identified diplomat James L. Morris, listed as a counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, as the CIA station chief here.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Grigory Karasin expressed regret over the incident but said Moscow was “forced” to respond to the “unjust” expulsion Friday of Alexander I. Lysenko, the suspected Russian intelligence chief in Washington, in connection with the Ames espionage affair. CIA official Aldrich H. Ames and his wife have been arrested on charges of spying for Moscow since 1985.

Morris is the first American to be declared persona non grata since Lt. Col. Daniel Francis Van Gundy III, an assistant military attache, was accused of espionage on March 15, 1989, and given 48 hours to leave the Soviet Union. The United States retaliated by expelling Sergei Malinin, a Soviet trade representative in New York.

In a similar tit for tat, Morris will be given seven days to leave the country, the same grace period the Clinton Administration extended to Lysenko.

Although Lysenko arrived in Washington only last summer, the United States decided to expel him because “he was in a position to be responsible for the activities associated with the Ames case,” State Department spokesman Mike McCurry said Friday.

The vague linkage irritated Russian officials, who suggested again that Washington has overreacted to the Ames case.

“To expel an officer who was officially recognized and not a covert agent goes beyond the boundaries and really calls for countermeasures,” Foreign Minister Andrei V. Kozyrev said in a television interview Sunday.

In a closed briefing for Russian reporters, Yevgeny M. Primakov, head of the Federal Intelligence Service, the agency that conducts foreign espionage, said he is baffled by the fuss Washington has made over the Ames case.

Primakov suggested that the Administration was using the Ames arrest to score domestic political points, to punish Russia for its independent stance on the conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina and to provide a convenient excuse for cutting American aid to Russia, according to journalists who attended.

The spy chief also reportedly found it peculiar that while Thomas R. Pickering, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, officially protested the Ames case, Pickering has not inquired about the fate of 10 agents for the CIA who were supposedly exposed by Ames, then arrested and executed.

The meetings between Russian intelligence officials and a CIA team sent here to assess the damage done by Ames were unsatisfactory to both sides, Primakov said.

But Primakov and other officials said that the expulsions should not damage U.S.-Russian relations and that he remains willing to cooperate with America to fight terrorism, drug trafficking and other mutual threats.

In Washington, McCurry said Monday that the Administration protested the expulsion of the American diplomat, but he said Washington has no plans to kick out another Russian as a counter-retaliation.

In Moscow, Deputy Foreign Minister Vitaly S. Churkin struck a conciliatory tone, saying that conflict between Russia and the West is inevitable but can be resolved if problems are not overdramatized.

But while the Foreign Ministry tried to put the espionage case to rest, rumors swept the intelligence community that Ames was unmasked not by an FBI investigation triggered by the couple’s lavish spending but by an American mole in the former KGB.

These rumors were fueled by President Boris N. Yeltsin’s dismissal Monday of Nikolai M. Golushko, head of the other KGB successor agency, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, which is charged with rooting out foreign spies in Russia.

Some sources said Golushko was fired after the Kremlin realized Russian intelligence had been compromised by a well-placed turncoat. The official reason for Golushko’s dismissal was given as “family illness, “ as his wife is reported to be seriously ill.

But there was no shortage of other theories about Golushko’s dismissal. The Itar-Tass news agency suggested that he may have been ousted for perceived disloyalty after allowing Yeltsin’s political foes to be released from Lefortovo Prison on Saturday.

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this report.