FOREIGN RELATIONS: Prefabricated Agent

As the State Department told it, Missouri-born Russell A. Langelle, 37, security officer in charge of the Marine guards at the U.S. embassy in Moscow, rode city bus No. 107 to work as usual one chilly morning last week, got off about 9 o’clock at the corner of Chaikovskovo Street and Vorovskovo Street, a block from his office. Suddenly, in the very best Eric Ambler fashion, five civilianclad men closed in around him, efficiently pinned his arms, covered his mouth, hauled him into a nearby alley where waited a Zim, the Buick-copied car used by junior Red officials.

Driven to a nearby building on Vorovskovo Street, ex-Navy Lieut. Commander Langelle produced his diplomatic card, claimed his diplomatic immunity from arrest. He demanded the right to call his embassy. The five Russian agents laughed, told him that his diplomatic immunity had been revoked. Then one Russian searched Langelle’s topcoat, claimed to find a notebook, which Langelle had never seen before. Sure enough, when the Russian applied a handy chemical solution to its pages, he found invisible ink notes on Soviet secrets. The ploy: the notebook looked like prefabricated evidence for a sure-to-convict espionage trial against Langelle.

The ploy didn’t work. Langelle refused to talk about his embassy work. The Russian., threatened him with what the official U.S. note of protest politely called “physical violence,” warned him that harm could come to his wife Miriam and their three small children. At length the Russians promised him money if he would spy on U.S. diplomats. After an hour and 45 minutes of this, the Russians gave up, let him loose at the corner where they captured him.

By afternoon, U.S. Charge d’Affaires Edward L. Freers delivered a hot, factladen protest to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Russian reply did not deny any of the facts, instead announced that “competent authorities,” presumably the same Kremlin officials who ordered the kidnap, found Langelle to be engaged in secret intelligence work, and therefore persona non grata. Langelle thus became the eleventh U.S. official to be kicked out of Russia since 1952, but the first to undergo third-degree preliminaries.

Grandly ignoring the incident, Moscow propagandists kept right on oozing words about the “spirit of Camp David,” which, they said, Nikita Khrushchev had created in the U.S.