RUSSIA: Spy Season

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Beating the drums for the approaching showcase trial of U-2 Pilot Francis Powers (see NATIONAL AFFAIRS), Moscow's propagandists sent Russia into its worst case of spy fever since Stalin's time. Day after day the Soviet press hammered away at the insidiousness of foreign influences ("I began to have unhealthy thoughts as a result of my enthusiasm for jazz"), reported with horror fresh cases of foreign visitors "caught" spying "under cover of the mask of tourism." After years of pleas for greater cultural exchange with the West, the Kremlin now seemed alarmed over the impact that this summer's 15,000 U.S. and British tourists might be having on the mind of Soviet man.

One of the first victims was Edwin Morrell, 30, an exchange student from Salt Lake City who in June was kicked out of Moscow State University and accused of trying to "pry secrets" out of trade union officials. A month later three U.S. tourists and a Briton were bounced for distributing copies of USIA's Russian-language magazine Amerika—which the

Soviet government long ago officially cleared for sale in Russia.

Last week the Russians expelled Colonel Edwin M. Kirton, the U.S. air attache in Moscow, on charges of trying to photograph military installations in Odessa and "actively carrying out visual observations" on a train ride southeast of Sverdlovsk.

Next day they kicked out Robert Christner, 27, a Russian-speaking U.S. tourist who wore a "suspicious-looking" money belt, took pictures of the harbor in Baku and incautiously gave chance Russian acquaintances his copy of Doctor Zhivago and a couple of New York newspapers. The day after that, police expelled James Shultz, 21, an Otis, Kans. boy on a Y.M.C.A. tour. Komsomolskaya Pravda said that Shultz had met in Kiev "a ras cal ready to sell his honor for foreign rags," had given him three Bibles as well as some clothes. ("I don't know of anything I'd rather be charged with," said Shultz's father, a Methodist minister.)

In tit for tat, Washington expelled Valentin M. Ivanov, first secretary of the Soviet embassy, accusing him of paying a young American "a substantial sum" to seek a U.S. Government job. But there were signs that the Soviet government was making progress in its campaign to keep ordinary Russians away from contact with foreigners: it doesn't take much to revive memories. Reported Los Angeles Schoolteacher Betty Jean Koferts, who was shadowed on her Soviet trip because she dated a Russian boy: "They took him to police headquarters and warned him against seeing me again . . . Most people there are afraid of Americans now."