Tit-for-Tat Diplomacy

Superpower spy scandals and tit-for-tat expulsions were frequent during the Cold War and continue to this day, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. As Moscow and Washington have traded allegations of espionage over the years, each side has periodically evicted a few diplomats from each other’s embassies.

Recent U.S.-Russia diplomatic evictions include:

* Wednesday: The Bush administration orders about 50 Russian diplomats to leave the United States. Six are directed to leave immediately on grounds they worked directly with Robert Philip Hanssen, the FBI counterintelligence expert arrested last month for allegedly funneling top secret U.S. data to Moscow.

* December 1999: Russia expels U.S. diplomat Cheri Leberknight after accusing her of trying to obtain military secrets from a Russian citizen. Washington orders Russian diplomat Stanislav Borisovich Gusev to leave after he is linked to a hidden listening device found in a State Department conference room.

* June 1999: Russia orders a U.S. Army attache at the U.S. Embassy in Russia, Lt. Col. Peter Hoffman, to leave after he is accused of spying.

* February 1994: The Clinton administration expels Alexander I. Lysenko, suspected of being the Russian intelligence chief in Washington, but gives him seven days to depart instead of the 48-hour Cold War standard. Moscow retaliates by expelling a senior U.S. diplomat, James L. Morris.

* March 1989: Washington-based Soviet military attache Lt. Col. Yuri N. Pakhtusov is expelled after U.S. officials accuse him of receiving documents describing techniques used to protect classified information in government computers. Lt. Col. Daniel Francis Van Gundy III, an assistant U.S. military attache in Moscow, is accused of espionage and given 48 hours to leave the Soviet Union. The United States expels Sergei Malinin, a Soviet trade representative without diplomatic status, in retaliation.

* 1986: Ronald Reagan expels 55 diplomats from the Soviet Embassy in Washington and the consulate in San Francisco for alleged spying. An additional 25 are expelled from the U.N. mission in New York. The Russians expel 10 Americans and withdraw 260 Soviet employees from the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and the consulate in Leningrad.

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Compiled by Times researcher Sunny Kaplan