Fearing Reprisal, U.S. Releases Former KGB Spy

In an embarrassing incident that spawned a furious bureaucratic tussle between the CIA and the FBI, the Clinton administration agreed Thursday to drop espionage charges against a former Soviet KGB spy arrested in New York last month.

Faced with an explicit threat of Russian retaliation against CIA spies or other U.S. officials in Moscow, the Justice Department agreed to drop its prosecution of Vladimir Galkin, a former “Star Wars” spy who was arrested by the FBI at John F. Kennedy International Airport while entering the United States on Oct. 29 to attend a business conference.

Galkin, 50, was freed hours after Russia issued yet another public protest of his arrest. Russia had an unusual partner--the CIA--in pressing the FBI to drop charges against Galkin, who had acknowledged in his U.S. visa application that the KGB had been his former employer.

U.S. intelligence officials said that they had been blindsided by the Galkin prosecution, a complaint also registered by the State Department.

A senior Justice Department official, who asked not to be named, said that both the CIA and the State Department had been told of the FBI’s plan to arrest Galkin and that a criminal complaint charging him with espionage and conspiracy had been prepared before he was picked up.

They had been under the impression, State and CIA officials countered, that the FBI had planned only to detain Galkin to talk with him about his old network of spies in the United States.

Officials of the two agencies expressed concerns to the FBI and the Justice Department about the plan to pick up Galkin. But they did not object, thinking that he would be quietly released once the FBI’s counterintelligence experts had a chance to question him.

So CIA and State officials were stunned when Justice decided to prosecute Galkin publicly. They scrambled to convince Justice to drop its case.

The FBI’s interest in pursuing Galkin years after he quit his espionage life shows how lingering suspicions still haunt the relationship between Washington and Moscow, especially in the shadowy world of espionage.

Russia immediately protested Galkin’s arrest and threatened to arrest Americans in retaliation. Russian Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin called Vice President Al Gore to complain about the Galkin case, Russian officials said.

“The Americans breached the unwritten rules of the game and the code of behavior of the world’s espionage services,” Tatyana Samolis, a spokeswoman for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, told the Interfax news agency. “Such things didn’t happen even in the worst Cold War times.”

Senior State Department officials were just as angry, charging that the case had been badly bungled by the FBI and Justice Department.

“The backlash from the Russians was sharp, severe and quick, both publicly and privately,” said a State Department official. “They [FBI and Justice] did not tell us they were going to take this guy to trial. This was just dangerous stuff.”

Justice officials finally relented. A written motion filed by the Justice Department in Worcester, Mass., said simply that the charges were being dropped “in the national interest.”

Galkin left the KGB in 1992, as the once-feared Soviet spy agency was undergoing a radical downsizing in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse. A smaller, reconstituted spy service, called the SVR, now operates as the Russian government’s spy agency.

According to U.S. intelligence officials, Galkin never worked as a spy in the United States but instead ran a string of American spies from Moscow and other KGB bases. He was in charge of handling highly technical espionage targeting the “Star Wars” missile defense program, known formally as the Strategic Defense Initiative, one of the Reagan administration’s most prominent and controversial defense programs.

In particular, Galkin was charged with trying to obtain secret “Star Wars” information from a Northborough, Mass., employee of Data General in 1991.

Galkin, acknowledging his KGB past, apparently assumed that with the Cold War now in the history books, the FBI would forgive and forget--especially since he was coming to the United States in his new role as a capitalist.

The CIA reacted so strongly to Galkin’s arrest in part because many of its former officers are now working in the private sector in Moscow.