Accused American Says He Spied for U.S. : Germany: Onetime campus radical was arrested on suspicion he passed secrets to former Communist East. He argues he was double agent.

An American social scientist arrested last spring on suspicion of spying for the Communist government of former East Germany claimed Thursday that he had indeed been a spy, but a double agent for the U.S. government.

Jeffrey Schevitz, a former campus radical from Berkeley and an employee of Germany’s Nuclear Research Center in Karlsruhe since 1980, told reporters that he had passed information on both the East and West German governments to the United States for more than a decade through a former director of the Aspen Institute Berlin, an American think tank.

Schevitz, 53, said he went to work for the East German Ministry for State Security--the Stasi--after moving to Berlin in 1976 at the suggestion of his alleged handler, Aspen Institute Berlin’s director, Shepard Stone.

He said Stone also sought intelligence on the West German government on such issues as the West’s desire to acquire nuclear weapons, “Ostpolitik” (the West’s policy of opening up to the East) and Stasi infiltration in Bonn.

Stone, director of the institute from 1974 to 1988, died in 1990.

Aspen Institute Berlin’s current chief, David Anderson, said in a statement that it is “inconceivable that (Stone) was involved in espionage activities while director of Aspen Berlin.”

U.S. Embassy officials in Bonn said they would not comment on Schevitz’s case because it is a matter before the German courts.

In Washington, the Central Intelligence Agency followed its rule of refusing to confirm or deny Schevitz’s allegations.

State Department official Dan Hamilton, who worked at the Aspen Institute Berlin in the 1980s, said Schevitz had tried to contact him there.

“I referred his calls to the embassy’s consular section,” Hamilton said. “I had absolutely no contact with him.”

He called Schevitz’s allegations “a clear sign of a really desperate person.” Of the entire list of allegations, he said: “It’s just not true.”

Hundreds of Germans have been arrested as Stasi spies since German reunification in 1990, but Schevitz is the first American. He was detained last May for allegedly passing information to the Stasi between 1977 and 1989, and released on about $65,000 bail on Sept. 6. He has not been formally charged--a lengthy process in Germany.

“I am not guilty of the accusation made against me that I was an espionage agent for the former East Germany, because from 1974--almost two years before I moved to Germany--until May, 1990, I have worked exclusively for, and under the instructions from, a representative of United States intelligence, and I want that to be known,” Schevitz said.

He said he was going public about his intelligence work because American intelligence officials had not intervened on his behalf.

Schevitz said he had received “expenses” from both Stone and the Stasi, but no salary or payment from either one for his espionage work.

Schevitz said he was approached by the CIA at Princeton University in 1962, but was unable to join because of serious diabetes. He said he met Stone in 1974 and was recruited by him into intelligence work the following year before he moved to Berlin to take a job at the Free University.

He said Stone told him that they would pursue “a two-pronged strategy” of gathering information on East and West Germany in the interests of European stability.

“This is why it’s difficult for U.S. authorities to admit I was working for them. We had some goals regarding West Germany,” he said.

Stone did not work directly for the CIA, Schevitz said, but “worked and sent information where it was appropriate to be sent.” He said he believed that Stone passed the information he gathered on to the State Department for use by various intelligence agencies.

Schevitz said that he never had any contact with other case officers and that he is seeking access to “Stone’s files” at the CIA to use in his defense.

In East Germany, Schevitz said, he was to gather information on the structure of the intelligence services, to develop a profile of the kind of recruits East Germany sought and to inform on the kind of information the East Germans sought from West Germany.