Still Spying After All These Years

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When seven astronauts blasted off aboard the space shuttle Atlantis from Cape Canaveral earlier this year, they scarcely imagined that a longtime KGB spy would be among those waiting to fete their homecoming. But veteran Belgian aerospace journalist Guido Kindt was on hand in Houston, the site of the Johnson Space Center, to offer them a hero's welcome. Ostensibly there to wrap up a deal to ghostwrite the autobiography of the shuttle's Belgian crew member, Kindt apparently had other business: he was keeping an eye on the U.S. space program for his paymasters in Moscow. Once back in Belgium, he and five others were arrested on espionage charges; Kindt has since admitted to receiving roughly $140,000 for his 25 years in the pay of the KGB and its postcommunist foreign-intelligen ce successor, the SVR (Russian Foreign Intelligence Service).

Revolution or not, Russia is still in the espionage business. At a time when Moscow is heavily dependent on the West's goodwill and financial aid, the pertinacity of Russia's spies has become a significant irritant between Russia, the U.S. and several of Washington's allies. Though unlikely to disrupt discussions on such important matters as arms control, the continued spying threatens to undermine U.S. support for a further easing of the cold war-era ban on sales of Western high-technology goods to Moscow. It could also block the detente that the Yeltsin administration is seeking between its foreign-spy agency and the CIA. "One standard of C.I.S. conduct should be a stand-down on intelligence gathering," argues Paul Joyal, a former U.S. Senate intelligence committee staff member who now heads Integer, an information-security consulting firm. "We can't be expected to invite them to dinner if they steal the silverware."

In an apparent attempt to defuse tension over the issue, Vladimir Lukin, Russia's Ambassador to Washington, has been advocating a so-called zero-game agreement banning mutual snooping. At a recent Washington dinner party, Lukin turned to CIA director Robert Gates and asked, "So when are we going to get together and make some new rules for spying on each other?" Even as Washington decries Russian espionage activity, the U.S. itself continues to snoop. It spent $30 billion on espionage last year, and recently profoundly irritated Moscow by deploying the eavesdropping attack submarine U.S.S. Baton Rouge close to major Russian naval bases.

In Moscow the SVR has announced that its roster of foreign agents and domestic personnel will be cut 30% and that the remainder henceforth will concentrate on economic studies, background investigations of Western & investors and similarly innocuous tasks. General Vadim Kirpichenko, a KGB veteran who is a key adviser to the head of the SVR, says the service intends to behave in a more "civilized" manner and its agents will eschew blackmail, the use of drugs and other traditional techniques employed to compromise and recruit foreign agents.