--------------------------

Filed at 6:32 a.m. EDT, Associated Press, September 11, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-APEC-Russia-US.html

AUCKLAND, New Zealand (AP) -- Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has urged Russia to cooperate fully with American efforts to fight money-laundering by Russian organized crime, a U.S. official said today.

At a dinner meeting Friday, Albright and Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov also discussed arms control, part of accelerating contacts to resolve a disagreement over amending a key 27-year-old missile treaty.

Two Russian multiagency task forces -- one on arms control, the other on international financial crimes -- are due in Washington next week to further the process, the senior administration official told reporters on condition of anonymity.

Albright and Ivanov, in Auckland to attend an annual Pacific Rim free-trade forum, also discussed a meeting planned Sunday between President Clinton and the newly appointed Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

With a U.S. investigation into alleged money-laundering by the Russian mob through the Bank of New York and allegations swirling in Moscow media about high-level corruption, Albright urged Ivanov to get his government to show it ``is actually addressing the problems,'' the official said.

She asked for and received from Ivanov a pledge of cooperation, the official said.

On arms control, both sides appeared less cooperative. Albright restated the case for amending the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty to allow for a limited defense system to guard against a few missiles launched by ``rogue states.''

The United States argues that the system would not harm the strategic balance because it would be ineffective against the kind of large-scale attack Russia could launch, even if it reduces its arsenals to levels envisioned under another arms treaty under negotiation.

Albright expressed condolences for the deaths of the more than 70 killed in an explosion Thursday in Moscow -- possibly set by terrorists. She said the tragedy showed how fighting terrorism is a common concern.

Ivanov warned of the dangers of tinkering with the 1972 treaty, known as ABM.

``ABM represents the cornerstone of strategic stability. Should that cornerstone be disrupted then strategic stability will be,'' too, Ivanov told reporters.

U.S. and Russian arms control negotiators have held two rounds of discussions so far. Their most recent talks, in Moscow this week, ended with no reported progress.

---------

By Robert Barr Associated Press Writer Saturday, September 11, 1999; 8:26 p.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990911/V000022-091199-idx.html

LONDON (AP) -- A new book based on long-secret KGB archives makes a number of shocking Cold War-era claims -- that the KGB planted rumors that the CIA assassinated John F. Kennedy and that J. Edgar Hoover was gay, and that Soviet spies buried booby-trapped explosives in the United States and Europe, according to news reports.

The book, being published this month, also reveals that an 87-year-old British woman was a long-serving Soviet spy and that a former Scotland Yard officer served as a messenger for the Soviet spy agency in the 1970s.

The book is based on thousands of copies of KGB papers brought out of the Soviet Union by Vasili Mitrokhin, an archivist for the Soviet intelligence service, when he defected to the West in 1992. Its contents were reported by The Sunday Times in London and a BBC television interview being broadcast on Sunday by CBS' 60 Minutes.

Mitrokhin, who reportedly copied thousands of pages from secret KGB files over a 12-year period and handed them over to the West, said the agency forged documents to pin the blame for JFK's assassination on a CIA and right-wing conspiracy.

In its attempt to establish a link between Kennedy's assassination and the CIA, the KGB secretly bankrolled the first book published in America about the incident, ``Oswald: Assassin or Fallguy,'' 60 Minutes reports.

The KGB also falsified a letter supposedly written by Lee Harvey Oswald to Howard Hunt, a former CIA officer. The letter looked so real that it even fooled Oswald's widow, the news program says.

KGB agents reportedly also mailed forged letters to major U.S. newspapers to support rumors that Hoover, then the FBI director, was a homosexual.

According to Mitrokhin, KGB spies in the 1960s and 1970s also surveyed potential sabotage targets in the United States and Western Europe and buried booby-trapped arms caches near the sites. Explosives remain buried today, 60 Minutes reports, though there was no information on exactly where they might be buried.

There were conflicting reports on the name of the new book by historian Christopher Andrew. The Sunday Times said it will be called ``The Mitrokhin Archive,'' but other reports referred to it as ``The Sword and the Shield.'' The book's publishers -- Basic Books in the United States and Penguin Books in Britain -- could not be reached for comment.

Mitrokhin, a former KGB archive official, said he started copying the agency's secret documents in 1972, after growing disillusioned with the agency's crackdown on dissidents. He said he smuggled the documents out, hidden in his shoes and pockets.

Mitrokhin told the BBC that it was ``his public duty to humanity and as a Russian patriot'' to reveal Soviet espionage against America.

The papers reveal that former police officer John Symonds left Britain in 1969 under suspicion of corruption and was recruited by the KGB, early editions of the Sunday Times reported. The newspaper said Symonds gave the Soviets names of police he knew to be corrupt and undertook a number of missions as a messenger.

Symonds returned to Britain in 1980, gave himself up and served a two-year sentence on corruption charges, the newspaper said.

The Times of London, sister newspaper of The Sunday Times, is serializing ``The Mitrokhin Archive.'' It reported Saturday that a British woman, code-named Hola, had given the Soviets information important to the development of their nuclear weapons since the 1930s.

Hola -- a.k.a. Melita Norwood of suburban Bexleyheath -- reportedly had access to British atomic secrets through her office job at the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, which was involved in metallurgical research associated with the bomb project, The Times said.

Andrew said Mrs. Norwood began working at the research association in 1932, when she was 20.

``Despite her comparatively lowly position, she was later to gain access to important scientific and technological intelligence,'' Andrew wrote in The Times.

Mrs. Norwood on Saturday said she would do it all again because of her belief in communism.

``I did what I did, not to make money, but to help prevent the defeat of a new system which had at great cost given ordinary people food and fares which they could afford, good education and a health service,'' Mrs. Norwood said, reading a statement outside her home.

The opposition Conservative Party demanded a statement from the government on Mrs. Norwood's case and on The Times' report that her prosecution for espionage was ruled out last year.

---

By JAMES RISEN, September 12, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/091299kgb-kennedy.html

WASHINGTON -- The Soviet K.G.B. fabricated evidence linking the Central Intelligence Agency to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and passed the material to unwitting conspiracy theorists in the United States, according to a new book based on K.G.B. files brought to the West by a defector.

According to the files turned over by a former K.G.B. archivist to British intelligence and detailed in a new book, Moscow's cold war spy service took several steps designed to link the C.I.A. to the assassination.

These steps included forging a letter from Lee Harvey Oswald to a C.I.A. officer, E. Howard Hunt, asking for information "before any steps are taken by me or anyone else," according to the new book, "The Sword and the Shield," written by Christopher Andrew and the former K.G.B. officer, Vasily Mitrokhin. The book is to be published by Basic Books this month.

The Oswald letter was supposed to have been written about two weeks before President Kennedy was gunned down in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, but was actually created by the K.G.B. in the mid-1970's, after E. Howard Hunt's name had surfaced in the Watergate investigation, according to K.G.B. files copied by Mitrokhin while he served as a K.G.B. archivist.

The letter was then passed anonymously to three conspiracy buffs and entered circulation in the United States when it was picked up by one writer of self-published assassination books, the authors report.

The letter led to a brief flurry of interest when a Dallas newspaper reported that a handwriting expert declared it to be genuine, but a Congressional panel that reinvestigated the Kennedy assassination in the late 1970's later concluded that the letter was probably a forgery.

The K.G.B.'s clumsy propaganda campaign never had much of an impact on the debate over the Kennedy assassination in the United States. But the archives spirited out of Russia by Mitrokhin appear to support the longstanding assertions by C.I.A. officials that the K.G.B. conducted disinformation campaigns designed to raise dark suspicions about the United States Government and prominent American leaders around the world.

The book also suggests that those efforts were amateurish and often silly. In August 1967, for instance, the K.G.B. authorized a plan to discredit the Rev. Martin Luther King by planting articles in the African press portraying him as an "Uncle Tom" who was secretly being paid off by the Government so that he would make sure the civil rights movement would not threaten President Lyndon B. Johnson.

The K.G.B. was apparently frustrated that a moderate like Dr. King had emerged as the most influential voice in the civil rights movement, but Moscow's comical propaganda revealed the K.G.B.'s lack of understanding of American politics and society. The K.G.B.'s propaganda campaign had even less impact than the F.B.I.'s separate, but equally fumbling, efforts to smear Dr. King.

"News that the K.G.B. was attempting to plant false stories in the African press portraying Dr. King as an 'Uncle Tom,' at the very time when Dr. King was harshly attacking Johnson's conduct of the Vietnam War indicates that American police agencies were not the only Keystone Kops active in the 1960's," said David J. Garrow, a historian at Emory University and the author of "The F.B.I. and Martin Luther King Jr."

Mitrokhin was a K.G.B. archivistin charge of managing many of the spy service's secret files until he retired in 1984. When he arrived in Britain in 1992 and sought out British intelligence, he brought with him a huge cache of notes that he said he had taken based on those files, and turned them over.

The Mitrokhin files, which the British considered reliable enough to share with the C.I.A. and F.B.I., have offered Western intelligence and law enforcement officials a treasure trove of historical information about K.G.B. operations around the world.

And while the archives quoted in the book contain only limited information about Soviet espionage cases, they have already helped identify some spies. In the United States, for instance, the book reveals that the Mitrokhin files helped lead the F.B.I. to Robert Lipka, a former code-clerk at the National Security Agency, who worked as a Soviet mole in the 1960's. Lipka was arrested in 1996 and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage. Information about other open spy cases contained in the archives were withheld from the book, including the case of a former State Department official, Felix S. Bloch, who was suspended in 1989 and resigned in 1990 but was never charged or arrested.

Mitrokhin first tried to defect to the United States but received a lukewarm reception from a C.I.A. officer when he approached the agency in a Baltic country soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Officials say that the C.I.A.'s Soviet/East European Division had decided that the K.G.B. was no longer a threat and had instituted a controversial policy that led C.I.A. officers in the field to turn away many defectors. Paul Redmond, who was then the C.I.A.'s deputy chief of counterintelligence, said in an interview that he sought to take over the Mitrokhin case after other officials had failed to show interest, but by then Mitrokhin had turned to the British.

Redmond now argues that the C.I.A.'s diffident handling of Mitrokhin's efforts underscored a larger problem, which was that the C.I.A. decided "naïvely" after the collapse of the Soviet Union to scale back its espionage operations against Moscow. ABC News reported on this controversy on Thursday.

The C.I.A. apparently did miss a good bet with Mitrokhin, since his archives also seem to reveal a wide array of intriguing insights into other K.G.B. operations, including the planting of secret caches of weapons in Europe and probably in North America, apparently for use in the event of war.

They also appear to show that the K.G.B. tried to blackmail Chancellor Willy Brandt of West Germany in the 1960's by alleging that he had spied for Moscow during World War II.

While Brandt was living in exile in Sweden during the war, he had provided information about Germany to the Soviets as well as the British and Americans, but never committed espionage, the files show. But in 1962, the K.G.B. attempted to blackmail Brandt by threatening to use evidence of his dealings with the K.G.B.'s Stockholm residency against him, according to the Mitro khin archives. The attempt failed.

The book says that Mitrokhin's files also pointed to the existence of a previously unknown British agent who was recruited on ideological grounds by the Soviets during the 1930's, but who survived the collapse of the famous Kim Philby spy ring.

Melita Norwood, code-named Hola in the Mitrokhin files, remained in place after the others in the Cambridge spy ring were identified or forced to defect to Moscow.

The book says that, after being recruited to the Soviet cause in the 1930's, she began to spy for Moscow after she started working for the British Non-Ferrous Metals Association in 1945, providing information on Britain's project to build its first atomic bomb. She spied for the Soviets for decades, and in 1958 Moscow secretly awarded her the Order of the Red Banner.

According to the book, she also tried to recruit other British officials to spy for Moscow, and succeeded in convincing at least one unidentified British civil servant to provide the Soviets with technical information and intelligence on British arms sales in the 1960's and 1970's.

She retired without being arrested and, now 87, lives in a suburb of London, where she spoke to reporters after news of her past was revealed on Saturday in The Times of London. She said she had no regrets.

"I did not want money," the newspaper quoted her as saying. "It was not that side I was interested in. I wanted Russia to be on an equal footing with the West."

"Older people, the ones who lived through it, might understand," she added.

"I'm not so sure about the young generation. I hope they accept it."

---

87-Year-Old Woman Said Soviet Spy
Friday, September 10, 1999; 7:38 p.m. EDT
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WAPO/19990910/V000341-091099-idx.html

Woman Says She Passed Secrets to Soviet Union
Details Revealed in Files Smuggled Out of KGB
By William Drozdiak Washington Post Foreign Service Sunday, September 12, 1999; Page A27
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/12/214l-091299-idx.html

No Regrets For Unmasked Soviet Spy In London
http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/news/international/0911/i_rt_0911_82.sml 3.08 p.m. ET (1912 GMT) September 11, 1999

---

September 11 1999
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/09/11/timnwsnws02014.html?999
Christopher Andrew tells the story of Melita Norwood using archives brought to Britain by Vasili Mitrokhin

Kim Philby, left, Guy Burgess, centre ...

THE KGB's in-house historians identified its ablest British agents as a group of five young Cambridge graduates recruited in the mid-1930s. After the box-office triumph of the Western The Magnificent Seven in 1960, they became known in the Centre (KGB headquarters) as The Magnificent Five. Like most of the other KGB heroes whose exploits are still celebrated by President Yeltsin's foreign intelligence service, all were male.

Had the KGB been more inclined to recognise the talents of its female agents, it might well have added the name of Melita Norwood to those of the Cambridge five and celebrated the achievements of The Magnificent Six. New evidence identifies Mrs Norwood as the most important British female agent in KGB history and the longest-serving of all Soviet spies in Britain.

The secret of her extraordinary career has also been far better kept than those of the Cambridge five. It can be revealed now only because of the even more extraordinary success of a dissident KGB officer, Vasili Mitrokhin (whose story will be told exclusively in The Times starting on Monday), in smuggling out of the Russian foreign intelligence archives the contents of its most highly classified files.

Born in 1912, the English daughter of a Latvian father and a British mother, Melita Norwood (née Sirnis) was a committed ideological agent. She spent all her working life as a secretary in the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association. The records of the association confirm that, as noted in her KGB file, she joined its office staff in 1932 at the age of 20. Despite her comparatively lowly position she was later to gain access to important scientific and technological intelligence.

In 1935 Miss Sirnis was recommended to the NKVD (the prewar predecessor of the KGB) by Andrew Rothstein, one of the founders of the British Communist Party. By 1937 she was a fully recruited agent. Her 40-year career as a Soviet spy, however, nearly ended almost as soon as it began.

She had links with a spy ring operating inside the Woolwich Arsenal, whose three leading members were arrested in January 1938, tried and imprisoned three months later. MI5 failed, however, to detect clues to her identity contained in a notebook taken from the Communist ringleader, Percy Glading (codenamed Got), and after a few months "on ice" she was reactivated in May 1938.

The Centre demonstrated its high opinion of her by maintaining contact with her during the next two years at a time when the purge of foreign intelligence officers led it to lose touch with many other agents, including some of the Five. At the outbreak of war it was clearly more interested in her than in Philby - despite the fact that he had been appointed Times correspondent with the British Expeditionary Force in France.

Unlike Philby, Mrs Norwood, by now married to a Communist mathematics teacher, was valued by Moscow chiefly for the technological and scientific intelligence (S&T) that she provided. From March 1945 onwards she supplied what her file describes as "many valuable materials" on the topsecret Tube Alloys project to build Britain's first atomic bomb.

At regular intervals, she removed the Tube Alloys files from her boss's safe, photographed their contents, and passed the photographs to her Soviet controller, who warned her not to tell her husband about her involvement in atomic espionage. Thanks in part to the documents she supplied, Stalin was far better briefed on the construction of the bomb than most British ministers.

Competition between the KGB and Soviet military intelligence (GRU) for control of Mrs Norwood - a clear indication of her importance as an agent - continued after the Second World War, before being finally decided in favour of the KGB in 1952. She usually met her controllers in the suburbs of southeast London to pass on photographs of documents from the association. According to her file, some of the S&T that she provided "found practical application in Soviet industry".

Mrs Norwood seems to have fallen out with the most celebrated of her KGB controllers, the legendary "illegal" Konon Molody, alias "Gordon Lonsdale" (codenamed Ben), whose misleading memoirs were later partly ghostwritten by Kim Philby.

As well as working as a Soviet spy, Mrs Norwood also acted as an agent-recruiter. The only recruit identified in Mitrokhin's material, however, is a civil servant, codenamed Hunt, whose cultivation she began in 1965. In the 14 years after Hunt's recruitment in 1967, he provided extensive S&T and other intelligence on British arms sales.

Mrs Norwood's file in the Centre records that throughout her career she was assessed as a "committed, reliable and disciplined agent, striving to be of the utmost assistance". In 1958 she was told that she had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Two years later she was rewarded with a pension of £20 a month, payable with immediate effect.

Mrs Norwood, however, was an ideological agent, who did not work for money. She remained throughout her career a true believer in the mythimage of the Soviet worker-peasant state that had inspired both her and the Magnificent Five during the 1930s.

---

BY MICHAEL BINYON, DIPLOMATIC EDITOR, September 11 1999
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/09/11/timnwsnws02015.html?999

EVER since the celebrated defections of Burgess and Maclean, Britain has been obsessed by the spy ring in our midst. The realisation that the Soviets had infiltrated the highest echelons of the security services, had penetrated the web of Anglo-American intelligence operations and had turned the well-heeled and well-paid sons of the Establishment into willing footsoldiers for Stalin was a shock from which British Intelligence took years to recover.

But, whenever it appeared that secrets were again safe, that the damage had been repaired and the ring broken up, a new revelation broke into the open. In 1963 it was the discovery that, as suspected, there had been a Third Man all along. Kim Philby, the former liaison between British and American Intelligence, the suave son of a famous Arabian explorer and the man who, even when pensioned off as a journalist, could still draw on a wide circle of friends, slipped away on to a Russian ship in Beirut harbour in 1963, only to surface weeks later just where everyone feared he would be - in Moscow.

But, with his unmasking, ministers and officials from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, downwards did their best to persuade a nervous public that there were no more "Apostles", as the circle of Cambridge spies came to be known.

Spying mania died down, for a while. It was revived by some spectacular security lapses: the capture of John Vassall, the former Admiralty clerk in Moscow, who was compromised, blackmailed and persuaded to pass caseloads of documents to the Russians; the arrest of George Blake, the former Dutch resistance fighter who was sentenced to 42 years' imprisonment, a year for every British agent for whose death he was held responsible.

It seemed there would be no repetition of the Portland spy ring, that led to the imprisonment in 1961 of the Krogers and Gordon Lonsdale.

Yet, all along, there was the belief that Burgess, Maclean and Philby could not have acted alone. There were some spectacular false leads but suddenly, in 1979, there was a fresh blow. The Queen's personal adviser on art, a man as laden with honours as he was with respectability, was unveiled as the Fourth Man. Sir Anthony Blunt was another Cambridge Marxist, and a convert to the Soviet cause.

He, however, had never been publicly apprehended. Instead he made a bargain with the security services: he told them all he knew and he was granted immunity from prosecution. The Queen was told; the Prime Minister informed. But, when the story broke, the uproar could not be contained. Blunt was stripped of his knighthood and hounded from his flat. Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister, faced a barrage of questions in the House.

Spies unveiled suggested that more spies were still to be caught. Were there? The answer was yes: there was a fifth. But his coming out was quieter.

John Cairncross, who died three years ago, always insisted he was never part of the Cambridge ring. He joined the Foreign Office at the same time as Donald Maclean. Like all the other spies, he quickly tried to establish himself as someone strongly opposed to Communism - indeed, even ready to lobby within the Foreign Office for some sort of accommodation with Hitler as a way of throwing anyone off his scent.

He became a vegetarian in order to curry favour with Lord Hanky, the vegetarian Minister without Portfolio in Churchill's Government. As his private secretary, he gained access to three areas in which the Russians were interested: the intelligence services, atomic research and the Committee of Imperial Defence. His job was so productive that Moscow got suspicious and he had to explain that almost every Foreign Office document of significance had passed through his hands.

---

BY NIGEL HAWKES SCIENCE EDITOR
http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/99/09/11/timnwsnws01017.html?999

WHEN agent "Hola" first betrayed Britain's nuclear secrets, the Government was still reeling from another betrayal - by the United States, which had withdrawn co-operation on the bomb.

It was this that drove the Attlee Government in 1945 to launch Britain's own bomb project, under the codename Tube Alloys. The project was huge, costing £1 billion at a time when Treasury coffers were tight but money bought a lot more than it does today, and it involved large parts of British industry.

As a secretary inside the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association, Mrs Norwood was well-placed to see information about the Tube Alloys project.

Building the bomb involved skills in manipulating many metals, and the association - an industrial research organistion funded by metallurgical companies - was the source of much of that expertise.

This put it "inside the loop" of those who knew what Tube Alloys really meant. The project basically duplicated what had already been done at Los Alamos. The first step was the setting up at Harwell, an old RAF airfield, of a research centre under John Cockroft, a Cambridge physicist.

Then, in December 1945, the decision was made to set up nuclear "piles" at Windscale to produce plutonium, and a separation plant to extract the plutonium from the other products of nuclear fission. Christopher Hinton, an ICI employee, was put in charge of the plant.

It was not until January 1947 that an explicit decision to use this material to make a bomb was taken, though Hinton was never in any doubt that that was its purpose.

A project of this scale, in a country as small as Britain, could not be completely hidden. How many of the details of the Tube Alloys project passed across the desk at the BNFMRA remains uncertain, but the principle of the bomb was already well-known to the Soviet Union anyway.

What may have been helpful to Moscow were details of the design of the British piles, and the separation plant. In the event, however, the Soviet Union beat Britain to the bomb by several years. The first Soviet test took place in 1949, the first British one in 1952.

Christopher Andrews writes: The British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association had been founded in 1920. In 1931 its first director, Dr Richard Hutton, became Professor of Metallurgy at Cambridge University.

The records of the association confirm that, as noted in her KGB file, "Hola", who was then single, had joined its office staff in 1932 at the age of 20. Despite her comparatively lowly position, she was later to gain access to important scientific and technological intelligence.

Attlee never allowed discussion of the Tube Alloys project by his whole Cabinet, later claiming that "some of them were not fit to be trusted with secrets of this kind".

Mrs Norwood's Russian file identifies her with 11 post-war case officers. Some doubt remains, however, about the identity of her controller from 1941 to 1944, who is identified only by a common codename. The fact that the unnamed controller was also involved with the atom spy Klaus Fuchs and was later interrogated by MI5 after Fuchs's arrest suggest - but does not quite prove - that she was Ursula Beurton (née Kuczynski) of Soviet military intelligence, the GRU. Britain's leading female agent was thus probably run for several years by one of the few female Soviet controllers.

Their meetings may well have resembled those between Beurton and Fuchs - brief walks during which they greeted each other as comrades working together in a great and noble cause.

---------

Arms Smuggling Bid Charged
Two Accused of Trying to Buy Aircraft Antimissile Devices

By Vernon Loeb Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 11, 1999; Page A10
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/1999-09/11/076l-091199-idx.html

A naturalized U.S. citizen from Belarus and his Russian partner were charged yesterday in Chicago with attempting to purchase and smuggle sensitive U.S.-made avionics to an unidentified customer in Russia.

The avionics, used to warn fighter pilots that their aircraft have been illuminated by enemy radar, are manufactured by an American company and approved for export only to Japan and Taiwan, prompting U.S. officials to speculate that the ultimate buyer in the scheme may have been China.

"There's no concrete evidence, but based on everything we've seen, the Chinese government is the ultimate buyer here," said Pat Jones, a Customs Service spokesman in Washington.

Peter M. Leitner, a senior strategic trade adviser at the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said Russian buyers of avionics made specifically for Japan and Taiwan "suggests they've got either a Chinese or a North Korean customer. That's pretty clear, and that's pretty disturbing."

Neither Japan nor Taiwan, Leitner said, "poses a threat to Russia."

Another Pentagon official, who asked not to be quoted by name, said that "the components sought by the two were probably intended for use in testing the capability of U.S.-origin electronic countermeasure systems. With the knowledge gained by testing against U.S. systems, modification could be made to foreign missile systems allowing them to increase their ability to avoid detection and strike the target."

One of the devices, called a digital frequency discriminator, is made specifically for use by Japan in its F-2 and F-15J fighters, court documents say. The other, an instantaneous frequency measurement receiver, is manufactured only for the Taiwanese military.

Mike Turner, the Customs Service's director of strategic investigations, called the scheme to acquire the avionics "one of the classic methods used by foreign governments to acquire sensitive military technology either for its direct use or so that it can be reverse engineered."

While foreign spies typically concentrate on acquiring secrets and ultra-sensitive technology that are not commercially available, Turner said, foreign intelligence services typically use front companies and overt arms dealers to acquire commercially available defense technologies by fraudulently obtaining export licenses or smuggling items out of the country, if licenses cannot be obtained.

A House select committee headed by Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) reported in May that Chinese procurement agents "have approached U.S. firms to gain an understanding of the uses of available technology and to evaluate [China's] ability to purchase dual-use technology under the guise of civil programs and within the constraints of U.S. export controls."

The panel also said there are more than 3,000 Chinese corporations operating in the United States, many of them front companies for Chinese intelligence and the People's Liberation Army that have "technology targeting and acquisition roles."

Customs officials identified the two men charged yesterday as Edward A. Batko, of Buffalo Grove, Ill., a naturalized U.S. citizen from Belarus, and Mikhail Romanovich Press, a Russian national in the United States on a temporary visa.

Batko was released on bail after putting up a $500,000 house he bought last year in a cash transaction as collateral, customs officials said. Press remained in custody. Both men, to be tried in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, face fines of up to $1 million and 10 years in prison if they are convicted of violating the Arms Export Control Act.

The case began in March after the manufacturer of both radar detection devices called the Customs Service and reported that Batko was trying to acquire the items, even though he had been told the State Department would never grant him an export license. An undercover customs agent then contacted Batko and said he could provide the devices for $160,000.

After numerous meetings, Batko met the undercover agent a week ago at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and told him that "the Russian organization wanting to purchase the [radar detection devices] is run by present and former KGB technical officials responsible for bugging the United States Embassy in Moscow," according to a Customs Service affidavit filed in Chicago.

At the meeting, the affidavit said, Batko told the customs agents that he had a "personal friend" arriving to smuggle the items back to Russia. " 'He goes through customs,' " the affidavit quoted Batko as saying, " 'you get paid.' "

In a subsequent meeting Wednesday night at the United Airlines Red Carpet Lounge at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport, Batko introduced Press to the undercover customs agent as his friend "Michael" from Moscow and said he was the one with authority to approve the deal.

After negotiating for three hours, they agreed that the undercover agent would deliver the devices next week to one of Press's agents at Dulles International Airport, according to the affidavit. Batko and Press were arrested by customs agents the following day.

Two Charged in Arms Smuggling Attempt
Filed at 11:40 p.m. EDT, September 10, 1999, By The Associated Press
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-Arms-Smuggling.html

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By JUDITH MILLER and STEVE LEVINE, September 12, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/asia/091299kazakhstan-us.html

ALMATY, Kazakhstan -- With Kazakhstan's strategic ties to the United States at risk over the sale of MIG jet fighters to North Korea, the Kazakh President has ordered a series of arrests, reformed the Government's arms export system and dismissed his closest confidante and adviser.

In an interview that focused on the recent sale, Foreign Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev said the Government was aware that the sale of some 40 MIG jets to North Korea had endangered its crucial relationship with the United States. Washington considers North Korea a rogue state for its support of international terrorism.

"We are disappointed, unhappy and frustrated with what happened with this incident," Tokayev said. "But what happened has happened, and the President is determined to punish those who failed to control the export of conventional arms."

Yet, in a development that further complicated the two nations' relationship, the Russian police late Friday detained Kazakhstan's main opposition leader, former Prime Minister Akezhan Kazhegeldin, on an extradition request by the Kazakh authorities.

American diplomats met on Saturday with Russian and Kazakh officials, a State Department official said, "to tell them we were very concerned about it and that it didn't look good."

Kazhegeldin, 47, who lives in exile in Europe, was detained on arrival in Moscow on a flight from London. He was later moved under police guard to a Moscow hospital after suffering what his aides said were heart palpitations.

The Russian authorities said they were undecided whether to extradite Kazhegeldin, whom the Kazakhstan authorities accuse of tax evasion and corruption. A lawyer for Kazhegeldin, Charles Both, denied the charges.

The incident occurred one day after the Government refused Kazhegeldin a place on the ballot for Kazakh national elections to be held Oct. 10. The Government asserted that Kazhegeldin had failed to register properly.

The American authorities last month learned of the transfer of the MIGs, a 1960's-era fighter that is still effective in an arena like the Korean peninsula. The transfer has forced the Clinton Administration to consider cutting off annual assistance of at least $75 million.

Since the 1991 Soviet breakup, Kazakhstan has maintained a very close relationship with Washington, leading the way in the elimination of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. In addition, President Nursultan A. Nazarbayev has become one of the Clinton Administration's closest allies in the region.

But the MIG controversy comes at a time of tension between the two countries over Nazarbayev's six-month-old crackdown on his political opposition and his promotion of close relatives to key Government posts.

Just this week, Nazarbayev appointed a son-in-law, Rakhat Aliev, as a deputy chief of the successor service to the K.G.B. in charge of the Almaty region, giving him the rank of major general. Aliev is a vehement critic of Kazhegeldin, the former Prime Minister, and has helped lead a long Government effort to discredit him.

While defending Nazarbayev's progress on democratization and his record on appointments, Foreign Minister Tokayev said concern over the MIG transfer had risen to such high levels that Vice President Al Gore had discussed the transfer with the Kazakh President in a telephone conversation last month.

He said they had agreed to a joint American-Kazakh investigation into who was responsible for the $8 million sale.

Tokayev asserted that the Russian Government was not involved in the sale, but said that at least two Russian officials -- including Mayor Yuri M. Luzhkov of Moscow, a leading candidate to succeed President Boris N. Yeltsin -- had intervened in the affair.

Last month, the Clinton Administration learned that a trainload of disassembled MIGs had been shipped from Kazakhstan to North Korea. That followed a similar incident on March 19, when another former Soviet republic, Azerbaijan, announced that it had impounded a cargo plane from Kazakhstan that was carrying six disassembled MIG fighters; the cargo plane's Russian and Ukrainian crewmen said they were headed to North Korea.

In addition to its previously announced dismissal of two senior officials -- including Nurtai Abukayev, head of the state Committee on National Security and Nazarbayev's closest confidante -- Tokayev said the Government had arrested about 12 people, including subordinates of Abukayev.

Tokayev said he did not believe that Abukayev had personally benefited from the sale, but that the President had asked for his friend's resignation because he had failed to control Kazakhstan's arms cache.

He said the President had revoked the conventional arms sale licenses of all private companies and ended the supervisory role of the Ministry of Defense in such sales. From now on, he said, these sales will be overseen by the office of the Prime Minister. That official has until now been regarded as a comparatively weak figure.

American law prescribes sanctions against countries that provide "lethal military assistance" to any of seven nations that Washington considers sponsors of terrorism. The State Department has a range of options, from waiving sanctions to halting all assistance.

Some supporters of Kazakhstan in Washington have complained that the Administration is trying to make an example of the Central Asian republic, a relatively weak state whose independence from Russia is guaranteed by Washington, while it routinely waives sanctions against Moscow. At White House insistence, they said, the Administration has ignored cases in which Russian officials appeared to be involved in such conventional arms transfers to Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries.

The Administration finally barred three Russian companies from doing business with the United States for a year after they sold anti-tank weapons to Syria.

In the Kazakhstan affair, Tokayev said his Government had received no money from North Korea and had requested that North Korea return the aircraft. He said that Kazakhstan had received no formal response, but that North Korea's envoy in Moscow had told a Kazakh diplomat there that his country had not received the planes.

Tokayev said repairing Kazakh-American relations was a top priority.

"The most important issue is to restore trust between the countries," Tokayev said. "We used to be very good partners. Big damage has been brought to our cooperation. I as Foreign Minister understand the seriousness of the situation. We are ready to do our part."

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September 12, 1999 By ROGER COHEN, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/091299germany-schroeder.html

BERLIN -- Marking a clear break with the caution of German foreign policy since World War II, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has laid out a new vision of his country's international role, describing Germany as "a great power in Europe" that will not hesitate to pursue its national interests.

The new definition of German foreign policy, in an article by Schroeder in the last edition of the monthly review of German unions, appears to signal the formal end of Germany's self-imposed reserve since 1945 even as it underscores the country's irreversible attachment to NATO and the European Union.

"Germany," Schroeder says, "has every interest in considering itself as a great power in Europe -- something our neighbors have done for a long time -- and to orient its foreign policy accordingly within the framework of Euro-Atlantic institutions." This policy, he adds, must be one of "fully acknowledged self-interest."

Under Schroeder's predecessor, Helmut Kohl, and other postwar chancellors, any reference to Germany as "a great power" or to national "self-interest" tended to be studiously avoided.

Rather, Germany liked to portray its interests as being synonymous with those of European integration and the NATO alliance out of a generally unspoken fear that any other policy would be regarded as incipient nationalism or a sign that an ugly history was rearing its head once more.

But the arrival in power of a postwar generation led by Schroeder, and the Government move from Bonn to Berlin, have signaled a distinct shift whose full scope the Chancellor has now articulated.

NATO used to be an organization "that served to protect Germany, but also as protection against Germany," the Chancellor writes, adding that this concept "has no value from now on." In its place, he suggests, a Germany without complexes has emerged.

Of course, the term "great power" is generally associated with a country possessing nuclear weapons -- not the case in Germany.

But Germany's prominent military role as part of a NATO force that bombed Kosovo signaled an end to the often repeated postwar principle that "only peace" would "go out from German soil."

The repercussions on European politics appear likely to be marked, not least on the French-German alliance, the relationship long at the heart of European integration and one based on a now exhausted marriage of interests.

As a power under Western tutelage, Germany could look to France for political muscle, while France relied on Germany to provide the economic dynamism it lacked. But now Germany has declared its intention to wield political power commensurate with its economy, which is one-third larger than the French, while France has fewer complexes about its fast-changing economy than a decade ago.

"France used to be proud of its historical essence and worried by its performance, while Germany was proud of its performance but ashamed of its history," said Dominique Moisi, a French foreign policy expert. "An alliance on that basis made sense, but now everything has changed."

The impact of Schroeder's shift on Germany's relationship with the United States appears likely to be less strong so long as Germany's new commitment to "national interests" does not involve deviation from NATO.

Schroeder, whose push to wean Germany from Kohl's relentless and painful history lessons has been generally popular, makes no overt reference to Hitler or the Nazis in the article and outlines what he sees as the future of a large European power that has paid its historical dues.

"Our partners have shown us that they accept us as equals, and that is the reason why they now expect us to accept and perceive our historic responsibility in an offensive way," he writes. As as example of this "offensive" responsibility, he cites Germany's role in stopping killing and "ethnic cleansing" in Kosovo.

Germany flew numerous sorties during the NATO bombardment of Kosovo and has deployed over 3,000 soldiers to the Prizren area as part of the peacekeeping force there. This role reflects Germany's new status, Schroeder writes.

Although the shift in Germany's policy and self-image is clear, the Chancellor repeatedly alludes to the importance of continuity, saying that Germany's "anchoring" in NATO and the European Union is irreversible and that its foreign policy will remain "in Europe, for Europe and of Europe."

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(ANA 20/8/1999) Hellenic Republic Ministry of Foreign Affairs, September 11, 1999 http://www.hri.org/MFA/press/brief1.htm

The Alternate Minister of Foreign Affaires, Mr. Yiannos Kranidiotis, called on Turkey to abandon plans to build a nuclear reactor following the recent devastating earthquake that killed more than 4,000 people. " A nuclear power plant would pose a great danger because the site of the plant in Akkuyu, is in an earthquake-prone area," Mr. Kranidiotis said in a private radio interview yesterday.

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By Shadaba Islam, Dawn (Pakistan), September 11, 1999
http://dawn.com/daily/text/top5.htm

BRUSSELS, Sept 10: Belgium on Friday approved the sale of $2 million worth of electronic components for the Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (Kanupp) but said the delivery would only go ahead once Kanupp became operational again.

Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt also said after a Council of Ministers meeting that Pakistan must accept the full-scope safeguards regime of the International Energy Agency which provides for regular monitoring of nuclear installations.

The decision to press ahead with the sale comes after weeks of internal debate on the contract among members of the so-called "rainbow coalition" of Green and Liberal parties in the Belgian government.

Green party members who oppose the use of nuclear energy were against the delivery of a nuclear instrumentation system to Pakistan but sources say the majority centre-right Liberal party approved the deal.

Alstom Systems & Services of Belgium won the contract in June 1997 and says the system it is selling to Pakistan will improve security conditions at the Kanupp power plant. Alstom also argued that abandoning the deal would aggravate unemployment problems in a country which is struggling to create jobs.

The controversy over Kanupp was a first test of the authority of Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt whose Liberal party came into power in July following the election defeat of the Social-Christian-Socialist alliance led by Jean Luc Dehaene.

The Alstom export license was approved by the Dehaene government but suspended in early August by Olivier Deleuze, a member of the Green party and state secretary for energy in the new administration.

Belgian officials said it was now agreed that future decisions on export licenses would be taken by the foreign and economics ministries and not by the energy department.

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Australian Broadcasting, September 9, 1999
http://www.abc.net.au/news/regionals/bunbury/regbun-9sep1999-1.htm

Labor leader Geoff Gallop wants governments or companies which move to set up nuclear waste facilities in Western Australia to be fined $500,000.

Dr Gallop has given details of a bill before Parliament to prohibit a nuclear waste facility in WA.

The bill also states that no government monies can be used to finance activities associated with the development or construction of such a facility.

The Government has already supported a motion in parliament stating its opposition to a nuclear waste dump, and is unlikely to support Dr Gallop's bill.

Meanwhile, the President of the Australian Conservation Council, Peter Garrett, believes it would be an environmental catastrophe to construct a nuclear waste dump in outback Western Australia.

Speaking at the West Australian Landcare Conference, Mr Garrett criticised the State and Federal Governments for failing to dismiss the proposal.

International company, Pangea Resources, has identified an area of land in central Western Australia to be used as an international nuclear waste repository.

Mr Garrett says it is worrying the Federal Government has not legislated against Australia becomming a waste dump, and shocking that people with past connections with the State Government have clear involvement with the Pangea proposal.

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