Moscow's spy dust

I suppose everybody on earth, including little boys and big men who read comic strips, have heard of the CIA and everybody else who does not read comic strips has heard of the KGB, but I should guess that the numbers – in the millions – would shrink dramatically if you could count the people who know that the Central Intelligence Agency deals with secret intelligence abroad, while the KGB deals with intelligence at home, the homeland being, of course, Mother Russia.

It is the fate of superpowers, whether in Ancient Egypt or nineteenth-century Britain or twentieth-century America and Russia, that the world knows the worst about them. To this day, I'm sure the universal image of a British imperialist is either that of a puffing, bloodshot colonel or a greedy trader enslaving millions of poor people of some dark colour in the interests of the home market.

By now, it's left to scholarly moles to dig up the name and labours of the great Lord Lugard, the pioneer colonial administrator of Nigeria who inspired at least two generations, including four schoolmates of mine, to renounce in college the making of money and who went off into the Indian civil service and gave their lives, literally, to the able and humane administration of native peoples.

I'm not saying that one type compensates for the other. Simply, that the big powers, by the sheer fact of being big and strong and rich are looked on as the big baddies. It's a fate that a whole procession of British governments, from the defeat of Napoleon to the arrival of Hitler, have had to accept. It's a fate which troubles very many Americans who are horrified that so many people at home and abroad look on the United States and the Soviet Union as, in the current phrase, moral equivalents.

I may be wrong, but I think it was Mr Harold Macmillan who, early in the war, told a high-ranking American official that when you are in power, you mustn't expect to be liked, let alone admired. You're lucky to be respected.

And when there are two world powers instead of one, it makes it all the easier for the hundreds of other nations on the outside to concentrate on the wicked or threatening institutions of the big two, and, perhaps, never stop to think that they, too, have some of the same institutions but don't publicise them very much.

For instance, I wonder how many listeners offhand can at once, or even after deep thought, name the initials of the French CIA and KGB or the Dutch or the Italian or the Swedish, the security services of the Chinese or the Albanians, not to mention Britain's MI5 and MI6? I doubt there's a nation, huge or minute, that doesn't have its security intelligence service probing away all the time in secret.

By the way, there's a complication in understanding even the simplest difference between the American CIA and the FBI. The Central Intelligence Agency, as I said, deals with intelligence abroad that might imperil the national security of the United States.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the domestic, investigating arm of the Department of Justice and may look into every sort of crookery, not only national security, that is suspected of going on, but only across state borders, not exclusively within one of the 50 states.

In other words, the FBI is not a national police force. There isn't one. The FBI, for example, had no jurisdiction in investigating the assassination of President Kennedy. That belonged, for one hectic weekend to the police of the city of Dallas. Well, that limitation has since been abolished. It is now a federal crime to make an attempt on the life of a president, wherever in the United States it happens.

Well, all these thoughts came to pass and I think the comic-strip image came floating up from my unconscious because, to the jaunty, space-comic phrase 'Star Wars' we have now to add 'Spy Dust'.

On Wednesday an ominous, or at least intriguing, message came in to the leading newspapers and television networks here that the American ambassador in Moscow was calling in, or assembling somewhere, all the American citizens living in that capital city to tell them something.

Before we had any confirming or clarifying word, every sort of Soviet American expert – what we call Kremlinologist – was phoned to explain not what had happened, but what was going to happen.

In the feverish state in which, today, all reporters and commentators live, a rumour has only to be tapped out on the news ticker to produce a knee-jerk reaction. For a couple of hours or so, I was telephoning here and there and heard that the United States had been given its marching papers from the Soviet Union to protest the White House decision to proceed with the first American test of an anti-satellite weapon against an object in space.

So much, I thought, for the learned commentaries of experts the previous evening on how the Soviets would take the anti-satellite decision. That Tuesday evening, I, for one, went to bed fairly happy because the Kremlinologist I most trust gave it, as his considered opinion that the Russians would a) respond strongly or b) weakly or c) not at all.

It took an hour or two on Wednesday to learn that the American ambassador would remain in Moscow, that he wasn't telling all the Americans living there to pack their bags and head for home and that what he had to say had nothing to do with the anti-satellite decision.

It had nothing to do with it until Wednesday evening when the TV political gurus began to ruminate again and figure the political ramifications of anti-satellites, the timing of the coming summit talk and what the American ambassador had said.

Well, what did he say? I'm not even sure he said anything, but somebody, some official at the American embassy informed the 500-odd American residents in Moscow that the Soviet Union, through the KGB, was using a mysterious, yellowish powder as a help in tracking the movements of Americans, and maybe other foreigners. A spokesman for the State Department here said, 'We have protested the practice in the strongest terms and demanded that it be terminated immediately.'

Read on a little and we hear from a senator who's the chairman of the Senate's intelligence committee which overlooks the work of the CIA and he throws off the passing remark that the United States has known about the use of this powder since 1976. Why the sudden umbrage of the State Department and demands in the strongest terms?

Well, it seems that the White House and the State Department have just discovered that the powder might conceivably cause cancer. Apparently, there's more than one powder. Again, that State Department man said that one agent – a chemical, not a man – was a mutagen known as nitrophenyl pentadien. A mutagen can cause genetic change and can be, therefore, suspect as a cancer-causing agent.

That was about all we had to go on by Thursday but the reactions came quick and fast. A Southern senator was on the tube saying it was a horrible thing that the Russians were giving our people cancer and we should close the embassy and sever all diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union. I hasten to say that is something that is not going to happen.

At the other extreme were people who said the whole thing was a clumsy much-ado-about-nothing plot to embarrass the Soviet Union before the summit talk and/or to stifle protests against the anti-satellite decision.

There seems to be no doubt about the powder and its use. It was, is, smeared or pepped on the seat of a car or its handle or a doorknob and so the stuff – invisible, I gather, to the naked eye – would be transferred to the hand of anyone touching the diplomat – a journalist, a dissident, say, that he'd been in contact with.

So how do the Russians spot the powder at long distance? Ultra violet light devices have been suggested, but when an administration official was asked to pierce the heart of this mystery, he said that how the tracking was done, the operational aspect, as he put it, was something he could not talk about and that the United States had not bothered to protest about a trick going on for nine years, because only now had laboratory tests done here showed up the minute possibility that the powder might cause cancer.

A morning after check of authoritative chemists, one from the American Chemical Association, for example, said that in all the literature, there are only eight references to this chemical among six million chemical substances and there is no reference to the possibility of cancer.

By the way, no American in Moscow has been given cancer or anything else, except a smidgeon of powder that lights up in a Soviet lab when I kiss your hand, madam.

It all sends me back 40 years to the age of innocence, when the Russian delegation arrived in San Francisco for the birth of the United Nations. They wouldn't go up to their hotel suites and rooms until a posse of their bodyguards cased the entire wing for bugged cupboards, closets, chandeliers and so on. This was not the sort of thing you reported in those days. I can only say we were shocked. We were so young, we didn't even know about bugging.

And years and years later, a lung disease specialist told me that deep in the hills north of San Francisco lie veins, geological veins of magnesium silicate, commonly known as asbestos and that, of course, it must get into San Francisco's water supply – not, however, in lethal doses. But for heaven's sake, he said, don't write anything about this or the entire population of San Francisco will go into a panicky fear of getting asbestosis.

It occurs to me. Do you suppose that during the nine-week United Nations conference, the Russians had their men digging deep into the coast range and planting layers of asbestos?

Just a suggestion, but you can't be too careful with those Russians!

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.