Soviet and U.S. spies expose each other's capers
The short, slick spy thriller had been written to order by Russia's famed detective novelist, Julian Semyonov—the Soviet Ian Fleming. Spread over five columns of Izvestiya last week, it had some of the suspense but none of the humor of a James Bond story. The tale began as Martha Peterson, 32, a tall, blonde vice consul in the U.S. embassy in Moscow, drove her car to a deserted street in the Soviet capital. Quickly changing from a white dress to a black outfit that would meld into the shadows, she boarded in rapid succession a bus, a streetcar, a subway and a taxi. Satisfied that she was not being tailed, she walked to a bridge over the Moscow River and deftly thrust a stone into a chink in the wall.
Suddenly, the area was alive with agents of SMERSH—the celebrated Soviet counterintelligence service. As the lady yelled "I am a foreigner!" to alert her Russian accomplice, who was lurking near by, the agents examined the stone she had left at the dead drop. Cleverly concealed inside were espionage instructions, miniature cameras, Soviet currency and gold. Most damning were two ampuls of a deadly poison. Peterson was charged with passing them to a Russian contact who allegedly had used the same poison in an earlier CIA plot to kill an innocent man.
There was some truth to Izvestiya's fiction. As some Washington officials tacitly conceded last week, the lady vice consul had indeed been involved in some Moscow capers of a type that are more or less routine in the murky world of espionage. She was a CIA agent operating under diplomatic cover in Moscow. Nabbed by Soviet counterintelligence last July, she was photographed with an array of spy gear and quietly allowed to leave the U.S.S.R. under diplomatic immunity. She was reassigned to Washington. Hours after the appearance of the Izvestiya story, the State Department instructed the CIA to put Peterson on leave. She immediately dropped out of sight. In answer to queries about the Izvestiya charges, a CIA spokesman denied only that Peterson had been involved in murder—a crime that U.S. intelligence agents are prohibited from committing by Gerald Ford's 1976 presidential order.
The Izvestiya story was the most dramatic salvo in a Le Carré-like "lookingglass war" that has developed between Russian and American spooks; in a sense, it is the mirror image of the East-West battle of words being conducted on the diplomatic front. The Soviet decision to make a sensational public issue of the Peterson case was apparently prompted by U.S. disclosures four weeks ago that the FBI had captured three Soviet spies in Woodbridge, N.J. One of the Russians, a staff member of the Soviet mission to the U.N., had diplomatic immunity and was swiftly sent home. The other two, United Nations Employees Rudolf Chernyayev and Valdik Enger, were indicted by a grand jury on charges of passing U.S. Navy secrets and jailed with the unusually high bail of $2 million each. FBI leaks to the press ridiculed the agents as ham-fisted operatives who had been caught with an orange-juice carton full of phony antisubmarine warfare documents that had been prepared for them by the feds.