ESPIONAGE: Mischa Meets His Match

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On the defensive, Mischa has stepped up "Lothario" operations, whereby handsome agents lure lonely Bonn government secretaries into bed and, ultimately, into East German service. He also takes advantage of West German unemployment by trying to recruit jobless people who might one day become useful sources. Thousands of unemployed computer technicians, data analysts, engineers and journalists have been offered jobs in innocuous-sounding "research" firms that turned out to be East German intelligence-gathering fronts. Many of the job seekers patriotically report the ploy. In a classic counterintelligence maneuver, some of Mischa's supposed recruits may have been "turned" into double agents for Meier.

The life of a double agent is not an easy one. Consider the case of Nikolai Artamonov, a former Soviet navy captain who defected to the U.S. in 1959 and later became a double agent, employed by the FBI under the name of Nicholas Shadrin. When Shadrin went to Austria in 1975, ostensibly on a skiing vacation, he stopped off in Vienna for a prearranged meeting with two Soviet secret policemen who thought Shadrin was their agent. While his wife waited in their luxurious suite in the Hotel Bristol, Shadrin kept a rendezvous with the two KGB officers on the steps of a Vienna church. He vanished. High-level U.S. intelligence officials in Washington believe Shadrin was kidnaped and is probably in a Soviet prison or dead. Some U.S. agents suspect he may have been a KGB plant in the first place.

Shadrin's Polish-born wife Blanka, however, is accusing the FBI of bungling his Vienna mission, then abandoning a loyal American to his fate. The White House has declared that the U.S. is trying to obtain information about Shadrin, a U.S. citizen. But a top State Department official said that Washington could not be expected to give Shadrin's disappearance high priority in U.S.-Soviet relations. After all, he observed, anyone who becomes an agent, especially a double agent, is playing a perilous game—and knows it.