Diplomatic Evictions Show Chill Between U.S., Russia

Despite pledges of good intent by both sides, relations between the United States and Russia appeared Thursday to have hit the lowest point since the Cold War’s end, symbolized in part by the Bush administration’s mass expulsions of Russian diplomats and Moscow’s plans to “adequately respond.”

The State Department formally notified the Russian Embassy in Washington that four of their diplomats have to leave within 10 days and two more who recently left will not be allowed back. All six were associated with Robert Philip Hanssen, the former FBI counterintelligence agent charged last month with spying for Russia for 15 years.

The department also ordered another 46 Russians stationed in at least three American cities to leave by July 1, in response to long-standing U.S. concern that a buildup of Russian agents since 1993 has given Moscow a significant edge over the United States in the number of spies. The list, finalized Thursday morning, includes envoys in Washington and San Francisco, and at both the consulate and United Nations Mission in New York, a senior U.S. official said.

It is the second-largest eviction of purported Russian spies in U.S. history--and the largest since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

President Bush, who authorized the evictions last week after lengthy deliberations over several policy options, said Thursday that he still believes he can work with Moscow. “Presented with the facts, I made the decision,” he said. “It was the right thing to do. Having said that, I believe that we’ll have a good working relationship with the Russians.”

And in an interview marking the first anniversary of his election, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin sought to emphasize the positive. He noted that Bush characterized Russia as “neither an enemy nor an adversary of the United States. I believe that this is a very positive signal, we have heard it, and we have the same attitude towards the United States. We count on positive dialogue.”

But the election of new presidents over the last year has introduced a new and somewhat unpredictable dynamic in relations between two countries that once divided the world into rival ideological camps but now profess to be 21st century “partners in peace.”

“Relations are chillier now than they’ve been in a decade,” said Michael McFaul, a political scientist at Stanford University. “They were headed that way going into this administration, and this administration would be happy to see it drift that way for the foreseeable future.”

In recent weeks, differences have increased over a growing number of issues. Moscow charges Bush’s proposal to build a new anti-missile defense shield is a violation of the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and a threat to half a century of disarmament treaties.

Russia is also angered that the State Department will meet today with a diplomatic representative of the deposed separatist government from Russia’s war-torn republic of Chechnya.

Meanwhile, CIA Director George J. Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld recently have accused Moscow of proliferating dangerous arms and technology by selling them to rogue states such as Iran and North Korea.

“The Bush administration has signaled in several ways that it isn’t going to help or deal with President Putin in the same way President Clinton did with President Yeltsin,” said Andrew Kuchins, director of the Moscow Center program at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace in Washington. “The spy case expulsions are symptomatic of a fundamental shift in relations--and signal a heightened potential for a major souring of relations.”

The language of the Cold War is even seeping back into the diplomatic dialogue.

Russian Foreign Minister Igor S. Ivanov said Thursday that Moscow hopes “the line and logic of those who are trying to push the human race and the United States back to the epoch of Cold War and confrontation will not get the upper hand in Washington. There was no basis for such a move.”

A ranking Russian secret service official said lists of “authentic” American spies to be expelled have been prepared, according to the state-owned Itar-Tass news agency.

“However, if Americans make a mistake and expel diplomats who have nothing to do with intelligence, Russia could also make mistakes,” he was quoted as saying.

In Washington, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said the flap revealed that the Russians never slowed down widespread espionage in the United States as the nation made the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia.

“Russia is not our ally. Russia is a competitor, as its predecessor was,” Shelby said. “We need to keep that in mind. We have to look at Russia’s agenda realistically. Their agenda is not our agenda. If we put that in context, then we know they will be very aggressive in espionage in the future too.”

But the new dynamic goes much deeper than the chemistry or policy differences between two countries. The premise of America’s post-Cold War policy has centered on bringing Russia into the European sphere. But recent moves indicate that the Bush administration now questions whether Russia will join the West in an equal partner relationship, Kuchins said.

“Obviously the relationship has disintegrated significantly since its heyday in the mid-1990s. The Bush administration has a much tougher attitude,” said Dmitri Simes, president of the Nixon Center in Washington.

“But the Russians clearly knew what they were doing after [the Aldrich H. Ames spy case] and they continued to work with Hanssen. While asking for economic and political aid, that’s not the best way to treat your major donor agent. The Hanssen operation offered the United States an opportunity to act.”

Former CIA agent Ames pleaded guilty in 1994 to spying for Russia for nearly a decade.

Bush has often said that he wants a “productive” relationship with Moscow but that he also intends to be “realistic.”

What the Russians may not have predicted, however, is that they were going to be far lower on the U.S. list of priorities than in the past. “Russians thought the transition to a new administration would be good for them, but now they’re quite nervous,” said McFaul of Stanford. “The new administration doesn’t really care about Russia, and to the extent it does it’s willing to play hardball.”

“They now realize that nobody in Washington really cares about how they react to things like this,” McFaul continued. “In the old days, they could depend on some Russia advocate in the administration they could call. But in this administration, there are no sympathetic listeners.”

The State Department tried to downplay the rift. “Yes, we’ve had a week of dealing with troublesome issues--Russia’s relationship to Iran, weapons proliferation, spies,” said a senior department official. “But we’re also working together on [a dispute between Armenia and Azerbaijan], the Palestinian issue, Korea, Afghanistan. There’s a lot of stuff we’re doing with the Russians, plus we support a democratic free market Russia. Don’t draw conclusions about relations with Russia based on spies. We’ll have productive areas and problem areas.”

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Times staff writers John Daniszewski in Moscow and Edwin Chen in Washington contributed to this story.