KGB MAY HAVE TAKEN SOVIET WRITER OUT OF LONDON, EX-CIA DIRECTOR SAYS

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CIA-RDP91-00901R000600420023-4
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September 20, 1984
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F_ Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 ARTICLE APPEARED PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER ON PAGE 20 September 1984 .GB may hake. taken Soviet writer - L o os- a network that feeds commercial raw tors," the British intelligence source cow had caused "considerable con- dio stations in Britain. The interview sat .. sternation to British intelligence." was broadcast on Capitol Radio in -'Te source declined to say how the Duff Hart-Davis, a writer with the London, return of Bitov, viewed as a "signifi- Sunday Telegraph, edited some of The British government has said - cant defector" because of his links the anti-Soviet articles Bitov had that Bitov had defected and been with top officials in Moscow, would written when he was in Britain. granted asylum in Britain after he affect Britain's chilly relations with Hart-Davis said, "One of his favorite disappeared on Sept. 9, 1983, while" the Soviet Union. phrases concerned 'the unmatchable covering the Venice Film Festival. Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey pleasure' of being free. His friends Britain protested strongly to Moscow Howe was scheduled to meet Soviet ... feel certain that he was abducted after Bitov, 52, denied Tuesday that Foreign Minister Andrei A. Gromyko or at the very least enticed." urner sat 3ournaltst Oleg Bttov, _ Quite an expensive lifestyle, said a Bitov worked devoted a full page who vanished from his London hide- 13 n is ante-Ihgence source, who yesterday to his reappearance there out Aug. 16 and turned up Tuesday in spoke on con noon of anonymity, and said Bitov soon would reveal- Moscow at a news conference, was 'But he missed his wife and daugh- more. It said Bitov would return to probably forced to make the accusa- ter very much." Bitov's wife and work for the gazette, although he Lions against the British "or die." daughter were in the Soviet Union may not :regain the high post of for. "I'm sure they [the KGB] would . when Bitov disappeared in Italy, eign culture editor with the right to have used torture too, if necessary, "It seems likely that he was lured. travel abroad. to get him to make his television back to, Moscow. is Press confer In Britain, the Daily Mail said that appearance," Turner said in a tele- ence had a ua purpose - to black- Bitov identified seven alleged Brit- phone interview from the ' United en our intelligence service and to ish operatives and two safe houses in States with Independent Radio News, discourage potential Soviet defer.. London and that his --t M out of London, ex-CIA director says By Ed Blanche "from now on has n Associated r?5? o future ahead of later this month in New York at the him. He certainly isn't going to be re- U.N. General Assembly. Gromyko LONDON - Former' CIA Director employed in his old job..I .think he's also has an invitation to visit London Stansfield Turner sai esterda that lucky if he avoids a prison camp in next year. e s~ovtt journalist who spent the last Siberia" The source dismissed the possibili. year tin Britain and then en surfaced in Four days after Bitov vanished ty that Bitov had been placed as a spy Moscow on Tuesda accusing ' the from his London apartment last in the West by the KGB, the Soviet British- of k dna in him m ave month, his car was found parked secret police and intelligence agen- been smuggled from London by the near the Soviet Embassy in London. cy. KGB. "He was settling in very nicelv to In.Moscow, the gazette for which Turner said, "I would by no means rule out his having been drugged, locked up in some kind of a crate and taken out of Great: Britain surrepti. tiously. "We all know that you've had a case of.that with a different country recently. The Soviets would have been much more skillful in clearing, it up." Turner was referring to an abor. tive attempt to smuggle former Nige- rian Transport Minister. Umaru Dikko, drugged, out of Britain in a crate July 5. A Nigerian and three Israelis have been charged with kid- napping him. Turner said Bitov, former foreign cultural editor of Moscow's Litera- turnaya Gazeta, or Literary Gazette, Office statement branded Bitov's as-. sertion that he was snatched in Ven- ice by British agents as "absurd and Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 r 7) CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR 20 September 1984 ][.7S prepares new concessions, new initiatives on arms ABM debate revived as both sides seem poised to break treaty By Brad Knickerbocker Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor Washington On Oct. 3, 1972, it seemed as though half the nuclear arms race had been halted. That is when a treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union limiting antiballistic missile systems went into force. In essence, as Henry A. Kissinger said at the time, the idea was to give offensive missiles "a free ride to their target" and thereby ensure that both nuclear powers retained their retaliatory force. . Today, though, many arms-control doubters - in- cluding some key Reagan officials - wonder whether the ABM treaty ought to be changed, if not scrapped. E Pr%)NS Er SPACE They look at the continuing buildup in nuclear weapons on both sides ,(which the ABM treaty was supposed to slow), the big advances in technology since then, and the allegations saes may not have more than one warhead, nor may their launchers be rapidly reloadable or mobile. Both coun- tries also agreed not to develop, test, or deploy sea-based, air-based, space-based, or mobile land-based ABM sys- tems, although research in these areas is allowed. The treaty was an acknowledgment of the overwhelm- ing destructive force of nuclear weapons. "It is a realpolitik approach, not an ideal one," says Sidney Drell, phy3icist and codirector of the Center for International Security and Arms Control at Stanford University. "The ABM treaty is the formal recognition that mutual destruction could not be escaped if the super- powers were drawn by accident or design into nuclear war.... It accepts deterrence as a present necessity and objective condition, not as. an active threat which would be intolerable." Today's debate over missile defense - prompted by President Reagan's controversial speech last year - ech- oes the one heard in this country in the late 1960s. But there are several important reasons for its revival. First., A, c even critics ~? the president's ;. Limative ac- knowledge, there has been remarkable progress in those technologies (sensors, computers, directed energy, and ways to transport things into space). that could be part of an advanced defensive system. Second, fears about the possibility of nuclear war - due in large measure to the lack of significant progress in limiting weapons of mass destruction - have heightened public interest in pursuing protective measures. Opinion surveys (including polls taken a few months before Reagan's "star wars" speech in March 1983 before the conservative Heritage Foundation) consistently show more than 80 percent of the public favoring strategic defense. - And third, there is mounting evidence that the Soviets may be positioning themselves to "break out" of the ABM treaty by deploying systems not allowed under the agreement. Among these is a large phased-array radar (which can track many targets at once), advanced mobile antiaircraft missiles that could possibly be used against other missiles as well, and ABM launchers that US intel- ligence sources suspect can be quickly reloaded. The United States in the mid-1970s built its allowable ABM system .(called Safeguard) around 150 Minuteman strategic nuclear missiles in North Dakota. But it was dismantled a few months later because of its high cost and the realization that Soviet missiles probably could penetrate it. The Soviet Union has kept its Galosh missile defense facilities around Moscow and now is building an im- proved ABM-X-3 system with better interceptors and radars. Critics of the President's strategic defense program are quick to point out that the US also may now be test- ing systems that encroach upon the ABM treaty. These that the USSR is violating the ABM treaty .in fashioning a nationwide missile-defense system. They wonder if the 12-year-old treaty has not outlived its usefulness, if the US should not use its tech- nological edge to defend against Soviet missiles.. In response, many nuclear strategist's and' former arms-control and defense officials have mounted a vigor- ous defense of the ABM treaty. They view President Reagan's controversial strategic defense initiative ("star wars") as a direct threat to what some see as the most successful superpower agreement in the nuclear age. "The American people are being misled into believing there is a magical solution to the nuclear predicament," says Gerard C. Smith, the Republican who -negotiated. the first US-USSR strategic arms agreement as well as "A US `star wars'-effort will prompt a similar effort by the Soviets," says Ambassador Smith, and "compel both sides to accelerate their race in offensive weapons, and increase the risk of nuclear war." The essence of the 1972 ABM agreement (and its 1974 protocol) is that the superpowers should be limited to a single defense system of no more than 100 interceptor missiles around the national capital or one ICBM (inter- continental ballistic missile) field. These defensive mis- Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 14 Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 f ^rrt pPrETP~ Political interference cited in 1980 inquiry, Ex-Carter official tied to loss of spy NEW YORK TRIBUNE 10 September 1984 ~ new probe of Mo By Bill Gertz NEW YORK TRIBUNE STAFF ?1984 New York Tribune WASHINGTON - The Senate Intelligence Committee recently weighed a congressional request to reopen its ultra-sensitive 1980 probe of Walter Mondale's top for- eign policy adviser. The committee denied the request despite charges that the investigation was obstructed by political tampering and unwilling- ness to air explosive, top-secret information, according to intelli- gence sources and congressional documents made available to the New York Tribune. The investigation 4 years ago reportedly cleared the Mondale aide, David Aaron, of charges he revealed information that led to the loss of a deep-cover American spy working in the Soviet Foreign Min- istry in Moscow. At the time, Aaron was Pres- ident Carter's deputy -national security adviser. He is currently a close adviser on foreign affairs to the Democratic presidential nomi- David Aaron, left, was investigated by the Senate Intelligence Committee, uw chaired by Sen. Barry Goldwater, after the loss of a key CIA agent in Moscow important foreign policy adviser, earlier served as his staff assistant on the Senate Intelligence Commit- tee when it was headed by the late Sen. Frank Church. He recently returned from Israel where, according to a report in the New York Times, Aaron attempted to improve both Mondale's and his own relations with the Israelis. In October 1983, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was first asked to provide records of the Aaron investigation by the House Post Office and Civil Serv- ice subcommittee on human resources. A letter from subcom- mittee Chairman Don Albosta, D-Mich.; and the subcommittee's minority leader Dan Crane, R-Ill., requested records "relating to the possible compromise of highly classified information" involving "high-level personnel of the National Security Council at that time [1980):' decision;' Aaron said of the com- mittee's recent determination not to reopen the 1980 probe. Gold- water could not be reached for! comment. A spokesman for the Mondale-: Ferraro campaign refused to com- ment on the report. Aaron, who has been described as Mondale's most nee. Aaron, in a telephone interview, would not comment on the allega- tion. He confirmed that there was an "extensive investigation;" but he denied that it was "an investigation of me." He referred questions to the office of Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "He's the man who made the Report on leaks In May, the subcommittee. released its report on unauthorized disclosures during the 1980 elec- tion, specifically covering the transfer of former president Jimmy Carter's debate notes to the Reagan campaign. The leaks were traced to Carter's National Secu- rity Council (NSC). According to congressional sources close to. the investigation, "numerous allegations" of Carter NSC leaks during the subcommit- tee probe were ignored. The sub- committee's final report was described as "highly partisan" and incomplete. The report mentioned Aaron as the person responsible .for preparing the foreign policy section of the purloined Carter briefing book. A House staff member who pur- sued the NSC leaks on behalf of Crane was told by Intelligence Committee staff director Rob Sim- mons last June 22 that committee records were "too extensive to per- mit perusal -hy.outaiders," includ- . ing investigators with top-level security clearances. Simmons did not see the subcommittee's Octo- ber request from Albosta and Crane, sources said. Intelligence Committee Chair- man Goldwater, in a reply to Crane L1 9f1tinupa Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 ARTICLr APP.E.ARED qN PAG_ Former CIA director Adm. Stansfield Turner confirmed that the Central Intelligence Agency funded psychic research under Vice President George Bush the admiral's predecessor. "The CIA had had a program of investigating psyc Chic phenomena. before in parapsyc o ~ time, i it which they had try to demon- strate t they could conjure up images of things they had never seen. Sometimes it worked; some- times i n't. The pro ram was by my time, one o eeping up with wFat was going on outside the CIA. We. tried to monitor what was going on in the Soviet Union and also what was going on quite openly in the U.S.," Ad . Turner said. "You've got two kinds of people," he continued, "Those who think it's kooky and those people who are kooky and think it can do much more than it can. I'm in the middle. ESPionage and the arms race r B Ste hanie Voss y p THE WASHINGTON TIMES J tem: Hella Hammid, a photog- rapher, sat in a room and accu- rately described a microscopic image contained in a sealed envelope a block away. Item: Submerged in a submarine off the California coast, Ms. Ham- mid accurately described a cliff- hanging oak tree on shore as a partner toured the randomly cho- sen site. Item: Painter Ingo Swann was given.a set of geographic coordi- nates. From the figures (49 degrees 20 minutes south latitude and 70 degrees 14 minutes east longitude), he accurately described the rocky terrain and outhouse at a Soviev- French weather station on the ant- arctic island of Kerguelen. These reportedly successful experiments are part of the contro- versial history of a field laughed at by most of the scientific commu- nity, yet closely watched - and per- haps heavily funded - by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union. The field is called parapsychol- ogy: the study of ESP, clairvoyance, telepathy and mind-over-matter techniques. Now, after years of wondering how - and if - psychic powers work, researchers say they are ready to face the test of prac- ticality. Not only is the government reportedly working on ways to replace James Bond gimmickry with ESPioniage, but psychics are ready to offer their services to busi- nesses, as well. U.S. government interest is based largely on the results of a controversial series of experi- ments during the 1970s at the Stan- ford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif. (The institute orig- inally was affiliated with Stanford University, but severed its connec- tions and changed its name to SRI International after student protests against military research on campus.) Researcher Russell Thrg said much of the institute's funds came from the federal government, but was coy about specifics, and most government agencies declined to comment. I don't think it should be dis- missed." That is why under Adm. Turner's tenure, from 1977 to 1980, the agency continued to monitor developments in psychic research both in the United States and abroad. Psychic phenomena -do have a "kooky" image and are linked by many with even more esoteric top- ics, such as UFOs, seances and cult- ism. Government agencies thus are understandably shy about using the vocabulary of parapsychology (lit- erally "beside psychology"). It is not a topic the military, in particu- lar, is anxious to discuss at all. WASHINGTON TIMES 28 August 1984 According to Ron McRae, the author of "Mind Wars," govern- ment and military reports tend to replace the term ESP, or extrasensory perception, with phrases like "novel biological information transfer systems" Thus, an accu- ?rate estimate of the U.S. govern- ment's spending on the subject is difficult to come by. The National Security Council said tersely, "We do not engage in it [psychic' research}" The Pentagon, however, was not as certain. "We don't find any items in the budget on psychic research," Pen- tagon spokeswoman Jan Bodanyi said last week, after checking indi- ces for 1983, 1984 and 1985. There is no index, she said, for any of the various euphemisms more likely to have been listed. Congress has gotten into the act also: A 1981 precis prepared by the staff of the House Committee on Science and Technology blamed low funding for a lack of quality research on "the physics of con- sciousness" The brief report cited the remote viewing experiments at Stanford Research Institute, add- ing: "In the area of national defense, there are the obvious implications of one's ability to identify distant sites and affect sensitive instru- ments or other humans. A general recognition of the degree of inter- connectiveness of minds could have far-reaching social and political implications for this nation and the world," One member of Congress has risked becoming a Capitol laugh- ingstock by not laughing at psychic research. Rep. Charlie Rose, D-N.C., a former member of the House Select Committee on Intelli- gence, is troubled by rumors that the Soviets have the jump on tele- pathic warfare. Some estimates place the USSR's support at the $30 million-a-year mark. Some military officials share his concern about a possible "psycho gap", "There are weapons systems that operate on the power of the mind and whose lethal capacity has already been demonstrated [in communist-bloc research]," according to Army Lt. Col. John B. Alexander. The colonel is credited by military spokesmen with spur- ring government interest in para- psychology. LJt.,'.:...4 Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 STAT Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4 AR't I CL ,01i YALE CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONIT~ ___&L__., 27 August 1984 Terrorism's new weapon: mines at sea By Stanfield Turner T HE mining of the Red Sea is a new, unfortunate step in international terrorism that will bring added costs and inconvenience to all of us. Mines are a unique weapon, in that the terrorist can be many miles away before a ship passes over them and they ex- plode. By the same token, they are indiscriminate weap- ons that cannot be aimed at a particular victim, only at a type of ship. There are two types of mines and three methods of planting them. There are "contact" mines which explode only when a ship physically hits them, and "influence" mines which are detonated by the sounds, magnetism, or pressures a ship generates as it moves through the water. An acoustic mine waits until the noise rises to a peak indicating that the ship has come close and then detonates. If the ship is close enough, it will damage it. The mine can have a threshold of noise set into it. A low threshold will make it detonate when a small, quiet ship passes by; with a high threshold the mine will wait for a big, noisy ship. Simi- larly, magnetic mines sense the magnetic field that sur- rounds the metal of a ship; and a pressure mine feels the pressure created as a ship compresses the water it passes through. Mines can be "planted" - anchored to the bottom with the mine floating somewhere below the water's sur- face, or laid right on the bottom. Drifting mines are usu- ally contact mines. They have a limited life because winds and currents carry them in odd directions and eventually wash them ashore. It's more common for con- tact mines to be moored below the surface so that they will strike the hull of the type of ship they are intended to damage. Influence mines are usually laid on the bottom, but can be moored below the surface when the water is too deep for an explosion from the bottom to be effective. Mines can be delivered by almost any ship, by bomber, or cargo aircraft. I estimate that those in the Red Sea are acoustic-influence mines laid on the bottom and delivered by a ship. The fact that they have done rela- tively little damage is because they are likely in waters too deep for the size of the mines. How do we go about countering mines once they've been laid? Ships can just avoid passing near them. One way to do that is to stick to very deep waters whenever possible. Most of the Red Sea is too deep for mines. Only its extremities,, the Gulf or Suez at the north, and the Strait of Bab el Mandeb at the south, can be mined. Na- val ships can use sonar to find the mines and tell ships where not to go. Navies can also try to sweep mines. For moored mines, either a helicopter or a ship tows under- water cables which snag the mine's mooring line reaching down to its anchor. A cutter device on the towed cable severs the anchor line, the mine pops to the surface, and someone has to shoot it to make it sink or explode. For bottom mines, the helicopter or ship tows a device that makes a noise like a ship or creates a magnetic field like one: When the mine senses these artificial signals, it thinks it has a ship and detonates. The United States Navy relies heavily on helicopter mine sweepers for just the reason that they can get places quickly, as they have to the Red Sea in the past few days. Mine-sweeper ships from the US would have taken al- most three weeks to get there. Mine-sweeping by helicop- ter is also safer, as the copter is above, rather than in, the mine field when it tows its mine-sweeping equipment. Over the longer run, the way to stop this form of ter- rorism is to prevent the laying of mines in the first place. We will have to do at sea much of what we do in airports rto deter hijackers; that is, inspect ships before they pass through narrow, shallow; minable waters to ensure that they do not drop mines as they go and prevent suspicious aircraft from passing over such waters. Those precau- tions will be costly. If the mining of the Red Sea encour- ages other terrorists to mine other places one way or an- other, each one of us will pay those costs of inspections, delays, and higher insurance rates, because the interna- tional shipping that is affected is essential to our eco- nomic well-being. In the US one of the best deterrents to terrorism has been an alert public that does not hesitate to report suspi- cious activities. Now the world faces the challenge of re- porting suspicious movements of ships at sea and in ports. We all have a stake in defeating this new challenge to world order. Stanfield Turner is a former director of the Cen- aTlntell ice A nc c - aval War College from 1972 to 1974. Approved For Release 2007/09/10: CIA-RDP91-00901 R000600420023-4