Old Spies Refusing to Fade Away

The Cold War may be dead and gone, but old-time espionage is alive and well.

That’s the lesson of a startling series of spy-vs.-spy capers in the last week. The barrage of bizarre revelations about low-rent tradecraft and high-tech skulduggery offered a rare peek into the shadowy world of special ops and secret agents. Indeed, the clock itself seemed to have turned back more than a decade.

And that’s just fine with America’s most senior spooks.

“We’re not living in a new world,” CIA Director George J. Tenet warned in an interview Saturday. “People who think we don’t need to be vigilant about counterintelligence, who think the world has really changed, are wrong.”

A top U.S. intelligence officer, who helps steal secrets from foreign governments, agreed. Some of the players may have changed, he said, but the game--and the stakes--remain the same.

“The dangers are still out there,” he said. “The Soviet Union has disappeared, the Berlin Wall has come down and the Communist bloc is no longer. But this kind of thing still goes on. Secrets can be lost, national security can be put at risk.”

The officer added that the advent of ever more sophisticated computer and other technology has made it more difficult to protect some of America’s secrets. “We can anticipate more surprises of this kind,” he warned.

But former KGB Maj. Gen. Oleg Kalugin, who spent 34 years as a Soviet spy and now lives in the Washington area, said the real surprise from the recent arrests and deportations is that they became public at all.

“This is a sign of worsening Russian-American relations,” said Kalugin, who once directed Soviet spying aimed at the White House, the State Department and Congress. “It’s obvious the Russians and Americans spy on each other. There’s nothing extraordinary or new about that. But in better times, [spy agencies] would have avoided publicity. They would have caught someone and ordered him out quietly. It happened all the time, and no one heard anything about it.”

Nor have some of the techniques changed that much. In the late 1960s, Kalugin was able to report back to Moscow a stunning cloak-and-dagger coup against the enemy in Washington.

“I oversaw the planting of a bugging device in the House Armed Services Committee room on Capitol Hill,” Kalugin recalled. “We had a very top-notch device installed under the desk of the chairman. Unfortunately, it was uncovered by the FBI soon after.”

The CIA had its own successes, of course.

“We secretly acquired by thievery, scams and trickery an amazing array of Soviet military equipment for the U.S. military to dissect and study that enabled the preparation of countermeasures,” former CIA Director Robert M. Gates said in a recent speech.

“The CIA stole Soviet weapons manuals, recruited Soviet scientists and engineers as agents who told us about weapons in research and development, and developed many often heroic agents who revealed much about Warsaw Pact plans and capabilities,” Gates added.

On the downside, he said, “we never recruited a spy who gave us unique political information at a high level inside the Kremlin.”

The latest spy flap began last week, when the U.S. Navy announced that it had charged Petty Officer 1st Class Daniel King, a code expert who had been assigned to the super-secret National Security Agency, with espionage. The NSA coordinates global eavesdropping and is America’s largest intelligence agency.

King had flunked a routine polygraph test, and a subsequent investigation led to charges that he had mailed a computer disk to the Russian Embassy in 1994 that contained classified data about U.S. submarine collection of Russian communication. Officials said the material was out of date but that the breach was serious. If convicted, he could face the death penalty.

Within hours, Russian officials swooped down on a U.S. Embassy employee in Moscow, Cheri Leberknight, alleging that they had caught her trying to steal military secrets. They ordered her ejected from the country, but not before they happily displayed gadgets they said Leberknight was carrying, including a pocket-sized jamming device to foil electronic eavesdropping and invisible-ink tablets.

The FBI struck back Wednesday with the detention and subsequent expulsion of a Russian diplomat in Washington who seemed a cross between James Bond and Maxwell Smart.

Stanislav Borisovich Gusev, the FBI said, had been spotted last summer driving around the State Department in a car with Russian Embassy diplomatic plates, circling until he could park in the same spot beside the building each time. It was a red flag for the feds.

The FBI and State Department security teams began watching the Russian as he nonchalantly lurked on the sidewalk for more than an hour each week, feeding parking meters and fiddling with the controls of a remote switching device hidden in his clothing.

The FBI said Gusev was downloading data into a receiver hidden in his car from a tiny but extremely sophisticated electronic transmitting device that had been installed in the waist-high wooden wall molding of a seventh-floor meeting room in the department’s Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.

U.S. intelligence officials called Gusev’s movements sloppy but expressed professional admiration for whoever managed to plant the bug in a supposedly secure part of a guarded government building. “It shows these people are extraordinarily capable, have really worked hard at planning this and are willing to take great risks,” one official said.

Then Friday, the FBI arrested Wen Ho Lee, a former nuclear weapon physicist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. It wasn’t hard to find Lee--he has been under 24-hour FBI scrutiny for the last nine months. About 200 agents took part in the surveillance, watching him garden, trailing him to the supermarket and lining the shore of his favorite fishing hole.

Lee wasn’t charged with spying for China, as was expected when his case first hit the news last spring. He instead was accused of illegally downloading highly classified data into an insecure computer. He also allegedly put the data on 10 high-volume portable computer tapes but is unable to account for seven of the tapes. If convicted, he faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for many of the 59 counts in the indictment.