Security : German Spy Chief Under Fire Over Alleged Plutonium Sting : The controversy stems from a 1994 seizure of nuclear materials said to have been smuggled out of Russia.

Pressure is mounting for high-level resignations in Germany in the wake of a report that last summer’s spectacular arrest of three men smuggling weapons-grade plutonium out of Russia was a setup.

The Bundestag, the lower house of Parliament, has summoned Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s top intelligence coordinator, Bernd Schmidbauer, to testify next week on whether Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service instructed its agents to pose as well-financed Third World operatives seeking plutonium on the black market.

Such activities would have encouraged the very plutonium smuggling that Germany is officially trying to prevent. Intelligence guidelines in Germany forbid police to incite trade in dangerous materials.

The accusations were published in this week’s issue of Der Spiegel magazine. It asserted that the Madrid station chief of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Service, known by its German initials, BND, had set up the smuggling operation and high-profile arrests with Schmidbauer’s blessing.

The arrests took place Aug. 10 at the international airport in Munich. German police moved in on two Spaniards and a Colombian businessman as they got off a Lufthansa flight from Moscow with about 13 ounces of highly enriched plutonium in their luggage.

Word of the arrests made international news, triggering fears that organized crime figures were spiriting nuclear materials out of the weakened former Soviet Union and offering them to any terrorist or rogue state with the money and will to make a bomb.

According to Der Spiegel, a magazine much respected and feared in Germany for its hard-hitting investigative journalism, the three arrested men were bringing plutonium into Germany mainly because German intelligence agents in Spain had put out the word that $276 million was available for anyone who could provide the fissionable material.

The magazine did not name its sources, and German authorities swiftly denied any improper activity. Schmidbauer, who oversees Germany’s separate foreign, domestic and military intelligence services, said the allegations would be investigated, but he defended the BND’s tactics.

“It is always better to have a preventive operation” than to wait until criminals strike, he told German television.

Still, opposition politicians have stepped up their calls on Schmidbauer to step down and even for the dissolution of the BND.

“Trading in plutonium is a punishable offense,” Social Democratic Party leader Rudolf Scharping said. “If an intelligence service incites such trading, then it has overstepped its boundaries.”

The Spiegel story added weight to rumors that have been circulating here since last year that the seemingly brilliant airport bust was really only a prearranged stunt. The arrests took place in the heat of a federal election campaign, and leaders of the opposition Social Democrats immediately charged that Kohl’s front-runner Christian Democrats had orchestrated the affair to portray themselves as tough on crime.

Russia, in the meantime, complained that all of its plutonium stockpiles were accounted for and that it was being wrongly singled out as a source of illicit nuclear materials. And Colombian diplomats said the arrested Colombian had been entrapped by a German undercover agent.

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Schmidbauer laughed off the Social Democratic charges last year as “absurd and bizarre.” And despite the Russian unhappiness, he traveled last summer to Moscow and negotiated an agreement by which Germany and Russia were to work more closely on controlling nuclear smuggling.

Kohl was reelected to his fourth term as chancellor in November.