Russia Livid Over Alleged Spying by U.S.

The former KGB is mad as hell about aggressive Western spying on Russia and its patience is running out, says an article in the official Russian government newspaper.

The unusual article, which was published in Saturday’s editions of Rossiskaya Gazeta and was written by a senior Russian counterintelligence official, names three U.S. diplomats whom Russia accuses of spying.

It alleges that Malibu-based Pepperdine University collected Russian defense industry secrets under cover of a U.S. government-funded program to encourage defense conversion. And it charges that the CIA has stepped up recruitment of Russian citizens with the goal of penetrating and undermining Russia’s military-industrial complex.

The author, Col. Sergei G. Gorlenko of the Federal Counterintelligence Service, hinted Tuesday that expulsions of U.S. diplomats from Russia may be forthcoming.

In an interview in his office in the KGB successor agency’s Lubyanka headquarters, under a portrait of the founder of the Soviet secret police, Gorlenko said the counterintelligence service has extensive information “about not-quite-diplomatic activities of the U.S. diplomats I mentioned in my story and some others too.”

“We are working hard and we have a lot of facts, believe me,” he said.

Gorlenko, 45, said he joined the KGB in 1971, and was a longtime operative before joining the public relations department of the KGB successor agency. He said he and his superiors decided to publish the article now because the hemorrhage of defense secrets has become “intolerable.”

The CIA and other U.S. agencies, as well as private American companies, “will use any means to obtain the last remaining secrets of the Russian military-industrial complex,” Gorlenko said. “We are losing everything. We are losing our economic and military potential.”

The attack took U.S. officials by surprise. Relations with Russia seemed to have stabilized in the wake of the Aldrich H. Ames spying case, which led to tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats in February. On Sunday, U.S. and Russian troops began their first joint peacekeeping exercises in the Russian heartland, at the Totsk military base in the Ural Mountains.

Nevertheless, Russian officials have never stopped grumbling about Western spying. In July, the director of the Federal Counterintelligence Service, Sergei V. Stepashin, said that Russia was especially concerned about spying by North Korea and the United States and that he had raised the issue with U.S. Ambassador to Russia Thomas Pickering.

U.S. Embassy spokespersons refused to comment on the article, or on any complaints made to Pickering, in keeping with their policy never to discuss intelligence matters. In Washington, the State Department said it had no comment on the allegations.

Two of the three U.S. diplomats named have already left Moscow. Gorlenko charges that Donald Gibson Plants, who worked in the embassy’s environment, science and technology section before leaving sometime this summer, was a “career intelligence officer” who tried to ferret out Russian military secrets under the cover of working on defense conversion.

The article also names Kelly Ann Hamilton, a former third secretary at the embassy, who departed Moscow at least a year ago. Hamilton has been accused in other Russian press articles of encouraging Russian informants who offered to provide details of the latest, top-secret Russian T-82 tank manufactured in the city of Nizhny Tagil.

Also named is a “vice consul of the U.S. General Consulate in St. Petersburg Geoffrey Giles,” but no such person is included on the U.S. diplomatic list in Moscow or St. Petersburg.

“The article sounds like a combination of some possible truths mixed with a big dose of paranoia,” said Washington-based espionage expert Jeffrey T. Richelson.

“I’m sure the CIA office in Moscow is still operating, but I’d be suspicious of calling Pepperdine University questionnaires a cover for espionage,” Richelson said.

Thomas P. Kemp, who heads the Pepperdine University Russian Conversion Program, called the spying charges “nonsense” and “outrageous.”

The program, funded by $1.7 million in grants from the U.S. Agency for International Development, has brought about 80 Russian defense plant executives to America over the past two years, Kemp said. It offers management training, helps develop a peacetime business plan for converting defense industries, introduces Russian executives to potential American business partners, and even tries to help them get start-up capital, he said.

“We think it’s a great program and are absolutely dumbfounded by the notion that it is some secret plot,” Kemp said. “I thought the Cold War was over.”

The end of the Cold War has not diminished the West’s desire for reliable information about the status of Russia’s still-giant nuclear arsenal and its troubled nuclear research facilities.

Given the recent plutonium-smuggling cases, and the potential for nuclear materials from the former Soviet Union to fall into the hands of terrorists, the United States has every motive for trying to plumb Russia’s nuclear secrets, Richelson said.

“If you could recruit an agent in MinAtom (the Russian atomic energy ministry), no government in its right mind would say no,” Richelson said. “It’s too much of a threat.”

Gorlenko said that last year, the counterintelligence agency nabbed about 20 Russian citizens who were spying for the West, and has exposed five more agents so far this year.

However, the surveillance continues to cut both ways. Earlier this month, Sweden filed a formal protest after learning that Russia had harbored and employed an escaped Swedish spy as recently as one year ago.

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