Russia: Alas, Poor Oleg!

It was a bitterly cold day, and most passers-by on Moscow's Kutuzovsky Prospekt hurried past the bus stop at Badaev factory. Buses came and went, but a tall American diplomat in a sports jacket stood peering at Lamppost 35, which was marked with a crude circle in charcoal. Finally, he jumped into a waiting car and roared off toward the Moscow River. Shortly afterward, another American ducked into a house at 5-6 Pushkin Street, where he surreptitiously reached behind a hallway radiator. As he was about to pocket the paper-wrapped matchbox that had been concealed there, Russian counterespionage agents burst in and arrested him as a spy.

"Proof" in Pictures. These goings-on were not in a James Bond thriller. They came in a detailed, two-part serial in Pravda titled Caught Redhanded, which may herald the biggest Moscow spy spectacular since Gary Powers' U-2 trial.

In all, the Russians have named seven Americans, one Briton and two Russians as major figures in the espionage ring, which was accused of "wholesale and retail'' trade in Russian engineering and scientific secrets. Top operative, according to Pravda, was the U.S. embassy's Russian-speaking physician. Air Force Captain Alexis Davison, 31, who was "openheartedly received as a true colleague'' by Soviet doctors. It was Davison, said the Russians, who was so preoccupied by the lamppost. The charcoal circle was a signal that information was ready to be picked up at 5-6 Pushkin Street by another embassy staffer, Richard Carl Jacob, 26, who, though only a secretary-archivist, was in reality, claimed Pravda, a graduate of a special U.S. spy school. The paper even carried "authentic"' photographs of the "spies at work."

Codes & Cameras. Their Russian contact, the real heavy of Pravda's story, was Oleg Vladimirovich Penkovsky, a vain cheapskate who held an "important job" in the Soviet agency that coordinates scientific research. The secret life of Oleg, the serial explained, revolved around his hopes of escaping to the West, "the alluring world where there is no honor, no fatherland, no moral duty; where everything is measured by the pocketbook."

Alas, poor Oleg! When Soviet intelligence raided his apartment, said Pravda, they found three miniature cameras for photographing documents, code books, chemically treated paper for sending invisible messages, radios to receive instructions from spy headquarters in Frankfurt and transmit "information about the U.S.S.R.'s scientific, technical, war and political problems." Why, with such equipment, Oleg resorted to such clumsy devices as scrawling signs on lampposts and hiding information behind apartment—house radiators. Pravda's thriller writer does not explain. It would never happen in a James Bond story.

A spy case in Paris last week appropriately sounded more like Simenon than James Bond.