‘Spy Mania’ Overblown, Russian Says

There’s one espionage suspect on trial, a U.S. Fulbright scholar was branded a spy in training and held on drug charges, and the United States is accusing Russia of buying surveillance secrets from a high-level FBI agent.

Into this ferment, Russia’s former spymaster emerged Friday from semi-retirement to say that all the “spy mania” is overblown.

In a break with Moscow rules, former spy agency chief Nikolai Kovalyov presented the closest thing yet to an official response from Russia’s espionage establishment to the arrest of FBI agent Robert Philip Hanssen in the United States last month and the recent rash of spy-vs.-spy stories.

He argued that Russian spy catchers have not returned to a Cold War footing and have been “totally restrained and balanced” in their pursuit of Western spies on Russian soil.

Kovalyov, who served as director of the main successor to the KGB under former President Boris N. Yeltsin, dismissed the importance of any secrets that his agency might have obtained from Hanssen. The spy agency, the Federal Security Service, is known as the FSB.

At a news conference, Kovalyov calmly urged Americans to take a detached view of the events.

“Unfortunately, scandals of this kind are not the first, and I am afraid not the last,” he said. “In my view, it is a mistake to elevate such scandals and incidents to the political level.” In particular, he said he hoped that the conflict would not escalate.

“The biggest mistake that the United States’ leaders could make would be to expel Russian representatives from the United States. Clearly, retaliatory steps would be taken--absolutely adequate ones,” he said. “Neither side is interested in this.”

The FBI has accused Hanssen--arrested near his suburban Washington home Feb. 18--of betraying his country for 15 years and passing on the identities of three Russian double agents working in the United States, leading to the execution of two of them.

They have also said that Hanssen may have provided Russia with top-secret information about how and where the United States has planted its most sophisticated overseas eavesdropping devices.

Kovalyov sought to cast doubt on the U.S. accusations against Hanssen, saying it might all turn out to be an “FBI provocation.”

For one thing, he said, he couldn’t believe claims of U.S. investigators that Hanssen was paid $600,000 in cash and diamonds and had an additional $800,000 deposited in Russian bank accounts during the course of his alleged espionage since 1985.

“Russia simply doesn’t have that much money,” he said. “As somebody who has worked with the special services for a long time, I tell you that all the problems that have afflicted the country--financial and economic--afflicted the special services too.”

Kovalyov, 52, who now serves as deputy head of the Security Committee of Russia’s lower house of parliament but still carries an FSB passport, argued that Hanssen’s role as a counterespionage agent within the FBI meant that whatever information he had was not vital to U.S. national interests.

“Even if one assumes for the sake of argument that Hanssen worked for Russia . . . what could he have conveyed?” he asked.

But his comments appeared to stop short of denying outright that Hanssen was allegedly employed by Russia’s spy handlers.

At one point, he said, “not a single country will forgo an attempt to get advance information on possible threats to it by another country.”

The espionage trial last year of U.S. businessman Edmond D. Pope, accused of trying to obtain plans for a sophisticated Russian torpedo, and the current trial of a nuclear arms expert, Igor V. Sutyagin, have led to charges that the FSB is emulating the old KGB--including show trials to dissuade Russians from having contact with foreigners.

A regional FSB spokesman in Voronezh this week alleged that a 24-year-old Fulbright scholar arrested on marijuana charges was in fact an espionage trainee in Russia to perfect his language skills. But the FSB stressed in a subsequent statement that it did not intend to charge the scholar, John Edward Tobin, with espionage.

Kovalyov said such cases are signs only that the FSB is doing its routine work. He was dismissive of suggestions that the FSB is turning back the clock to the days before the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, when it was at war with the CIA and other intelligence agencies.

“I think that while we may not be friends yet, we are already equal partners” with the U.S. intelligence services, he said. He cited intensive cooperation in recent years in the fight against international terrorism, arms trafficking and organized crime.

“A return to the past is simply impossible,” he said. “We are a different country. . . . Everything has changed totally.”