Freed spies’ careers over

Press, 14 February 1986, Page 6

Freed spies’ careers over

NZPA-Reuter Bonn The eight prisoners swapped with the Soviet dissident, Anatoly Shcharansky, in an EastWest deal this week were mostly professional agents whose careers in the spy world were over, West German Intelligence sources said yesterday.

But the release of the group, on the Berlin border on Wednesday, had underlined a trend towards easy trading of captive agents that had cut the risks of the spying business and could encourage Soviet intelli-gence-gathering in the West, they said. The United States and

West Germany handed over five convicted or suspected agents on Berlin’s Glienicke bridge in return for Mr Shcharansky and three people jailed as Western spies in the Soviet bloc.

The exchange of the eight lesser-known figures in the deal took place 30 minutes ' after Mr Shcharansky had left.

The West German sources said most of them were fairly unimportant professional agents. “There were no highcalibre people among them,” one said. The three from the East were Wolf Frohn, aged 41, jailed in East Germany as a United States spy,

Dietrich Nistroy, aged 50, convicted by East Berlin of spying for Bonn, and Jaroslav Javorsky, aged 38, jailed by Prague for betraying state secrets.

The Intelligence sources said the five people passed to the Soviet bloc—a Czechoslovak couple, a Russian, a Pole, and an East German—were second-grade agents who had been engaged in relatively low-level Intelligence work.

All the professionals who passed East or West across the Glienicke Bridge on Wednesday would never spy again. The sources said that

although the West was always pleased to obtain the release of agents captured by the East, exchanges such as the Berlin swap were causing some unease among governments and Intelligence chiefs.

Spy trades had been increasing in the last few years and the effect was a steady reduction in the risks in espionage work, which, some experts believed, was encouraging the Soviet bloc to increase its activities.'

N.A.T.O. security experts in Bonn agreed and said another problem was that most such swaps were tilted in favour of the East Europeans.