Russian Security Service Expels U.S. Businessman as Spy

MOSCOW —  Russia’s intelligence service disclosed Sunday that it has expelled an American businessman for “activities damaging the interests of Russian state security,” the third espionage allegation by the Kremlin in less than a week and a sign that the age of East-West trust may be over.

The action taken by the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB--a successor to the dreaded Soviet-era KGB--followed Tuesday’s declaration by the FSB that nine British diplomats would be expelled and the news a day later that an Estonian had been asked to leave for “activity incompatible with the status of a diplomat”--an internationally used euphemism for spying.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry declined to confirm the FSB report that Richard Dann Oppfelt, president of Seattle Medical Export Inc., was expelled Friday from the Far Eastern city of Petropavlovsk Kamchatsky, as reported by the Interfax news agency.

When asked about the Interfax report, U.S. spokesman Richard Hoagland said: “The American Embassy has no information about this reported incident.”

But a Moscow spokesman for the intelligence service verified that the order to leave Russia had been issued by the FSB office in the Far Eastern region, and a Western diplomat who requested anonymity likewise confirmed the Russian action.

Oppfelt, who arrived home in Bellevue, Wash., over the weekend and left immediately for a vacation with his family, told Associated Press on Sunday that he had done nothing wrong and that the accusations were “mystifying to me.”

The expulsion of Oppfelt intensifies concerns among political and diplomatic observers that the Kremlin may be whipping up anti-Western sentiments on the eve of the June 16 presidential election.

But the spate of incidents also begs the question: What remains secret in Russia in this time of deteriorating security at key defense installations and withering funding for the control and accounting of sensitive materials?

While the targets for espionage may have changed since the Cold War ended and President Boris N. Yeltsin’s government has sought to ease adversarial tensions, Western diplomats and former secret agents both contend that spying is alive and well in today’s more accessible Russia.

“Russia still keeps plenty of secrets that foreign intelligence services are craving to get their hands on,” said Mikhail P. Lyubimov, a retired KGB agent and former station chief in London and Copenhagen.

In this more open society, there are fewer restrictions on the movements of diplomats and other foreigners in Russia. That means, the former spy said, that those gathering intelligence on political strategies in this election year, on missile and aircraft technologies in which Russia remains strong and on military planning when a war is raging in the volatile Caucasus find today’s Russia a veritable open book compared with the closed and forbidding Soviet Union.

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“The current government simply cannot sustain the army of KGB agents that used to tail Western diplomats and businessmen in the old days,” said one senior envoy from a Western country. “And with all the scientific and educational exchanges going on, there is access now to places that only four or five years ago were completely off limits.”

Money offered by Western operatives is also a powerful lure for some Russians with access to secret or sensitive information who are struggling to make ends meet in this transitional phase of wild capitalism that offers little compensation even to the most prestigious scientists.

“I know Russians who have approached Americans and said, ‘I want to be an American spy,’ ” said Sergei Markov, a political analyst with the Moscow branch of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But whether the current rash of Russian spy allegations reflects a genuine rise in espionage activities here is open to question, with many observers of the hard-fought presidential campaign seeing political motives for the expulsions.

“Yeltsin needs this to show that Communist propaganda about him--that he’s an agent of Western leaders--is wrong,” Markov said. “Now he can say, ‘Look, we found their spies and arrested them and kicked out some of their diplomats.’ This is for the election campaign.”

Western diplomats here speculate that Britain was chosen for a Kremlin display of toughness because it has considerably lower levels of investment in Russia than the United States, Germany and other major Western countries. That would limit the stakes for economic retaliation by Britain.

Nonetheless, London did issue a veiled warning of retaliation in the event of a mass expulsion like the one announced Tuesday, and the Russian government exhibited second thoughts. After the FSB announced that it had delivered a list of nine diplomats at the British Embassy linked with a Russian arrested and charged with treason, the Foreign Ministry said it was negotiating with London over the number to be expelled. The case remains unresolved.

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Little was made public about the American case, and apparently Oppfelt left Russia from the Far East rather than through Moscow. U.S. Embassy officials speculated that he might have been a frequent visitor based in the United States.

The last American expelled from Russia was a security analyst asked to leave an academic institute last fall. Up until the late 1980s, expulsions of diplomats, business people and journalists were commonplace maneuvers to retaliate for U.S. expulsions of alleged Soviet spies and often to express displeasure over the state of relations.

Even Russian media have been speculating that the wave of spy mania stems from Yeltsin’s desire to look tough against Western infiltrators and protective of the Russian people.

Times staff writer Richard Boudreaux contributed to this report.