3 Held on Charges of Cold-War Spying

Three Washington-area residents, including a former high-ranking lawyer at the Pentagon, are being held on charges of spying for East Germany in the years before the end of the Cold War, federal law enforcement officials announced Monday.

The three, arrested last weekend in an FBI sting operation, decided to become spies during their student days at the University of Wisconsin and were motivated by leftist leanings, the government officials alleged. Recently, undercover agents posed as South Africans and reportedly again won their cooperation in a plan to steal secrets from the United States.

The trio--Theresa Marie Squillacote, 39, her husband, Kurt Alan Stand, 42, and James Michael Clark, 49--appeared briefly in court here Monday afternoon. A federal judge ordered them to remain in custody until a second hearing later this week, basing his decision on the strength of a 199-page FBI affidavit in which the suspects allegedly openly and repeatedly voiced their eagerness to spy against this country.

Authorities alleged that, although the East Germans paid the three more than $40,000, it was ideology--their interest in overthrowing the U.S. government--that propelled their espionage activities.

If the charges hold true, that fact would distinguish the case from other espionage scandals in recent years, in which such convicted spies as Aldrich H. Ames of the CIA and Earl Edwin Pitts of the FBI were motivated mainly by money.

No so these three, said U.S. Attorney Helen Fahey. “This affidavit presents a portrait of three Americans who betrayed the people’s trust and the obligations of American citizenship,” she said.

Officials, however, said the damage to U.S. national security appears less serious than in the earlier cases.

From October 1991 until last January, Squillacote served in various positions at the Defense Department. Most recently, she was a senior staff attorney in the office of a department undersecretary, a position that she left last January. Stand is a regional representative for the International Union of Food, Agricultural, Hotel, Restaurant, Catering, Tobacco and Allied Workers’ Assns. The couple lives in Washington, D.C.

Clark, a resident of Falls Church, Va., and an expert on Slavic languages, is a private investigator.

The affidavit charged that the three “collectively made over 30 trips outside the United States between July, 1974, and July, 1990, all or most of which are believed to be in furtherance of their espionage activities.”

The three were charged with attempted espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage.

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Squillacote and Stand were arrested after driving to a prearranged meeting with the undercover FBI agents at an Arlington, Va., hotel. Clark was taken into custody in Fairfax, Va.

According to the government, Stand became an agent for East Germany’s foreign intelligence service, known as the HVA, in the mid-1970s. A native of New York, he volunteered, according to HVA documents now available to this country, for “ideological” reasons. He allegedly recruited Clark in 1976 and Squillacote in 1980, about the time they were married.

Squillacote, a Chicago native who the government says also was devoted to Marxism, and Clark, born in Lowell, Mass., were the primary intelligence-gatherers, according to the allegations.

The FBI said that over the years the group obtained State Department, Pentagon and CIA documents on Soviet military plans and personnel. The documents were allegedly funneled to East Germany and presumably passed to the Soviet Union’s KGB intelligence operation. Soviet agents then could better assess how the United States obtained such information.

The charges also state that Clark provided the HVA with secret documents he obtained while working both as a paralegal for the U.S. Army and for a defense contractor at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Boulder, Colo.

Transcripts from the alleged meetings with the FBI show that Squillacote and her co-defendants had been eager for new espionage contacts since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990, which led to the reunification of Germany. They often spoke brazenly of their hatred for the United States.

The government sting targeting the three began in 1995 after Squillacote, then a Pentagon employee, allegedly wrote a lengthy letter to a senior member of the South African Communist Party referring to herself as both a Marxist and a communist. She allegedly described the “horrors” of America’s “bourgeois parliamentary democracy,” which she said produced “spiritual death.”

If convicted, the three could receive maximum punishments of life in prison and a $250,000 fine. Fahey said the death penalty also could come into play.