RUSSIA: Spies

To hear the Communists tell it, the U.S. is having great success in sending spies through the Iron Curtain.

Satellite Rumania reported the capture of Wilhelm Spender and Constantin Saplakan, "two spies dropped in the Fagaras district on Oct. 18 by a U.S. aircraft which had set out from Athens." Spender and Saplakan, Rumania said, were recruited from an Italian D.P. camp in 1951, trained in "special U.S. espionage schools in Italy," and "given the task of committing acts of diversion . . . also of gathering military information."

Hungary announced the arrest of four Hungarians accused of spying for the U.S., and described one of them as "an American-trained agent employed by the U.S."

Moscow's Tass news agency announced the execution of A. I. Osmanov and I. K. Sarantsev, said to have received "special training from U.S. intelligence officers in topography, the use of weapons and parachuting." Osmanov and Sarantsev, said Tass, had been flown from Greece in a U.S. plane and dropped in Moldavia last August, for the "organization of acts of diversion, terror and espionage," after which they were to have crossed the Soviet Armenian border and reported to U.S. intelligence officers at Kars, Turkey.

In the tough trade of espionage, it is an axiom that an exposed spy is disowned by the organization which employs him. Spender and Saplakan, Osmanov and Sarantsev (if they were not propaganda fiction) might have worked for any one of a dozen national or political groups in Western Europe, persecuted and exiled by the Soviet Union. None admitted it. As for the U.S., State Department Spokesman Michael McDermott was emphatic: "We know nothing of these men, and we know nothing of the incidents."