Military-Industrial Official Spied for Britain, Russians Say

A senior Russian official in the military-industrial complex has confessed to spying for Britain and has been charged with treason, Russian officials announced Tuesday.

The bombshell, widening the espionage war between Moscow and the West, comes just when U.S. officials thought the exchange of unpleasantness over the alleged spying of CIA official Aldrich H. Ames for the Kremlin was over. On Monday, Russia expelled a U.S. diplomat it said was the CIA station chief here in retaliation for the expulsion last week of the alleged Russian intelligence chief in Washington.

Both sides had expressed hope that the diplomatic tit for tat would end the spat triggered by the Feb. 22 arrests of Ames and his wife.

But Tuesday, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, the KGB successor agency responsible for rooting out foreign spies on Russian soil, suddenly announced the espionage arrest. The alleged spy, an unnamed top official “within a military-industrial complex organization,” had been given special spy equipment for writing invisible messages and had been delivering military and economic secrets to the British Embassy in Moscow for more than a year, the agency said.

The British Embassy in Moscow and the British Foreign Office in London had no comment Tuesday.

One noteworthy aspect of the announcement was that officials said the man was arrested Jan. 15 and confessed 10 days later, nearly one month before Ames and his wife were arrested.

The Federal Counterintelligence Service did announce in January that 20 Russians had been arrested for spying for foreign countries last year. But it did not give any details.

Mikhail P. Lyubimov, a former KGB station chief in Copenhagen, said the British spy flap is in the “vintage Soviet style of leaving no blow unanswered.”

“I wouldn’t yet call this a revival of the Cold War,” said retired KGB Gen. Oleg D. Kalugin. “But it demonstrates at minimum that some of those still in or close to power who are interested in reviving the Cold War are very active, jumping at the opportunity to flex muscles the world hoped were gone.”

Kalugin faulted the United States for provoking the conflict but said Russia should have limited its retaliation to Monday’s expulsion of U.S. Embassy counselor James L. Morris.

The arrest announcement is in keeping with the harder foreign policy line that President Boris N. Yeltsin struck in his first State of the Nation address to Parliament last week.

But a spokeswoman for the Foreign Intelligence Service, the agency that would have directed Ames if he was in fact a Russian spy, struck a conciliatory note. Tatyana V. Samolis noted that Russian intelligence wants to continue to cooperate with its Western counterparts in fighting arms proliferation, international organized crime and terrorism.

Sergei L. Loiko in The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.