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    By Ronald Koven
    (c) 1983 Boston Globe (Independent Press Service)
    PARIS - I used to call him my guardian angel. Every self-respecting
American correspondent in Paris seemed to have been approached by
one, a regular visitor from the Soviet embassy who wanted to come
around to chat every couple of weeks or so.
    Some correspondents drew visitors who seemed too dense or hard-line
to be worth it and discouraged them. But my predecessor in the Paris
bureau of a Washington newspaper had been assigned someone who had
seemed worthwhile enough.
    So, when I got the inevitable call from the Soviet embassy in early
1978, I agreed to an appointment with my caller to discuss the state
of the world.
    There was something surprisingly angelic about him. He was about 30
with straight blond hair, a shy smile, a slight frame, not at all
like the stereotyped beefy Soviet colonel. His suits could have come
from Madison Avenue. He was friendly and polite to my secretary; it
was obvious from the start that he had aroused her motherly instincts.
    He introduced himself, Anatoli Korendiassev, but he saw that his
name was giving me trouble, so, he said very kindly, ''Just call me
Anatol.'' His calling card described him simply as ''Attache'' at the
Soviet embassy here. I thought I heard him say he was a press attache.
    He said he wanted to practice his English. But it was painfully
slow, so I decided to try him out in French. That was rather better.
He came regularly every couple weeks. I wasn't quite sure what he
wanted, but I noticed after awhile that I was generally getting a
pretty good account of Moscow's political line on events three or
four days before the news agencies were reporting it from Moscow out
of Pravda or Izvestia.
    He was eager to know what I thought about President Carter, the
state of the U.S. economy, whatever. I repeatedly stressed that my
opinions were purely personal. That did not seem to phase Anatol at
all. He even started asking me out to lunch. So, I made a pact with
him: I would accept if we could take turns paying. He wanted to try
three-star French gastronomy, and I had to severely restrain the
Michelin Guide level.
    Over lunch at the Hotel California off the Champs Elysees, I asked
him how he thought the French Left would do in forthcoming
legislative elections when all the opinion polls in 1978 had them
winning hands-down. He said he would bet another lunch that the Left
would lose. He turned out to be right. It was clear from the results
that the French Communists had sabotaged the Left. I wondered how
much Anatol's correct prediction was shrewd analysis and how much was
based on hard information on what the Communists were planning.
    One rather busy week he asked to come by, and I had no time at the
office, so I told him he could come to my apartment Saturday morning.
He appeared with two gift-wrapped bottles of vodka that he took out
of an attache case. ''To help you get through the lonely nights,'' he
said as he handed them to me.
    I decided it was time to take out a little insurance by letting a
friend at the U.S. embassy know about the talks with Anatol, just in
case.
    I started trying to be provocative while keeping my arguments
critical. I told him that Soviet attempts to Finlandize West Germany
were very dangerous to the Kremlin because they might actually
succeed, and then a reunited Germany would swallow up the Soviet bloc.
    I also tried to get under his skin over Poland and Afghanistan. I
told him that it was about time a Russian leader asked forgiveness
from the Polish people for Soviet atrocities against Poland the way
Willy Brandt had done on behalf of the Germans. Anatol took it all in
smilingly. His expression seemed to say he might just possibly agree,
but he never said, even though his jokes occasionally seemed to stray
dangerously.
    One day, Anatol suggested that perhaps I would like to trade up and
establish a relationship with someone higher-ranking than he. I said
I saw no reason for that since we seemed to hit it off personally.
    About that time, a fellow American correspondent brought around his
regular Soviet visitor, also billed as a press attache, to meet me. I
told him I knew his colleague in the embassy press office, Anatoli
Korendiassev. That drew a blank look, then the attache's face lit up
and he said, ''Oh, yes, he must be from the other press office.''
    I wondered what Anatol could possibly be gaining, aside from getting
a bit of the Soviet line, labelled as such, printed in my paper.
Anatol often approvingly called my attention to the foreign policy
reporting and commentaries of one of France's most conservative
newspapers, Le Figaro. That suggested to me that some Figaro staffers
must also have regular callers and that they must be doing a good job
of reflecting what they heard, without necessarily labelling the
sources, however.
    (MORE)
    
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    X X X THE SOURCES, HOWEVER.
    I made it a standard practice to ask Anatol what was going on in the
French Communist Party, where there then seemed to be a lot of
conflict between pro-Soviet and anti-Soviet factions. He invariably
replied that that was not really his bailiwick. But, in the midst of
a French Party congress, he called to say he wanted to see me right
away. He volunteered that the Communist Party had fully returned to
Soviet control. I wrote that Soviet sources were saying that, and it
was prominently published in Paris.
    A French Communist acquaintance identified with the more independent
line called in a rage and asked how I could dare write such a silly
thing. Two weeks later, after the congress had ended with rather
mixed public signals, the French Communist called back to say: ''I
owe you an apology. Your Soviet sources were right. It's all over for
us.'' A few months later, he quietly quit the party.
    Another time, Anatol told me that a Soviet general who had died in
Moscow had in fact committed suicide upon his return home from war
service in Afghanistan. Before printing that, I wanted to be sure I
knew what was behind it. I tried unsuccessfully to check further in
Paris and Washington, so I decided to let it ride. About six weeks
later, the story appeared in a London Sunday paper just as Anatol had
recounted it. It seemed obvious that when I had failed to come
through, it was leaked to someone else.
    Anatol seemed increasingly relaxed. In a restaurant, he pulled out a
very thick wad of French 100-franc notes, the kind of roll you used
to see in movies about Prohibition mobsters. I pretended to ignore
it. I still accepted the occasional pint bottle of Stolichnaya or
Moskovskaya vodka. It seemed impolite to refuse. Besides, Anatol
apparently had a quota of bottles to distribute, and I didn't want to
make it needlessly hard for him to fulfill his plan. One year, there
were even two small jars of Christmas-wrapped caviar. They stayed in
the back of the refrigerator for months, until a caviar-loving fellow
correspondent who was getting a stock of his own from another Soviet
visitor helped me finish them off.
    Anatol was talking of staying in Paris at least until the following
spring. He brought my secretary one of those tiny, painted, wooden
Russian baba dolls, the kind that fit into each other, only hers was
the smallest one at the end of the line.
    Then, in November of 1980, Anatol suddenly stopped calling. My
secretary started to worry. We remembered that some of his jokes had
seemed particularly out of bounds the last time we saw him. We called
the Soviet embassy and were told he was gone. I expressed surprise
that he had not said good-bye, and I was told that he had left in a
hurry.
    So, I asked a friend at the French Foreign Ministry if he could
determine whether my guardian angel was shipped home in disgrace. My
French friend called back to say: ''Your guardian angel was only half
an angel. But you knew that. We caught him red-handed picking up NATO
documents from a contact. So, we sent him packing. Please don't
spread it around. We don't want to make waves.''
    But that was under the previous French administration, before the
government started sending out offending Soviets by the planeload.
This week, I called the correspondent who introduced me to his Soviet
visitor, the ''real'' press attache, to ask if they were still seeing
each other. ''Oh, no,'' came the reply, ''My guy was on the plane.''
    END
    
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n528  2224  09 Apr 83
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    By Michael Adler
    (c) 1983 Chicago Sun-Times (Independent Press Service)
    PARIS - The moment I met Soviet diplomat Valery V. Krepkogorsky, I
thought he was a spy.
    The French government seems to have agreed with me, since it this
week expelled Krepkogorsky and 46 other Soviet diplomats and
officials for ''activities incompatible with their status'' - in
other words, for espionage.
    I am a Paris-based U.S. newspaper correspondent and first met
Krepkogorsky, a Soviet UNESCO delegate, while covering the United
Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization's fourth
extraordinary session here last December.
    We talked briefly about UNESCO and then about ice hockey, since I
wanted to know why a Soviet team had never beaten the Montreal
Canadiens (the Canadiens finally did lose to a Soviet squad this
year). Krepkogorsky, who is short, stout and dark-haired, had worked
at the UN in New York and spoke perfect English. He was very friendly
and wanted to know exactly who I worked for and what I did.
    Naively enough, I put his curiosity and Russian accent together and
said, aha KGB. But I dismissed this impression as the product of an
imagination overheated by James Bond movies and John le Carre novels.
    Two months later, Krepkogorsky called me to say he had valuable
information to communicate about UNESCO. I asked him what it was. He
said we should meet in person.
    But when we finally got together at UNESCO headquarters, he had
nothing to say about UNESCO. He said he wanted to talk to me because
he knew no one in France and did not speak French well. He said he
thought we could get together often, that perhaps I could help him
learn about France. Hadn't he detected a trace of a Slavic accent
when my wife answered the phone, he asked. This made me chuckle,
because my wife was born and bred in New York City.
    But I was annoyed. Krepkogorsky obviously had more in mind than a
social chat, but it had nothing to do with UNESCO. The only reason I
was there was to talk with him.
    Striking a confidential tone, Krepkogorsky told me that I, as an
intelligent person who lived in Europe, undoubtedly realized that the
Soviet Union wanted peace and that the Americans were just trying to
maneuver out of nuclear parity into a first-strike capability. He
said pacifist movements in Europe were a sign that people recognized
this.
    The last thing I wanted to do on that sunny winter's day in Paris
was to sit and listen to Soviet propaganda, especially from someone
who thought that I might swallow it and then put it into a newspaper
article. But still, for a second I thought of agreeing with him. I
thought of expressing discomfort over being an American. I wondered
what sort of conversation we would have then. Would I then have seen
how the KGB tries to ''penetrate intellectual, society or
journalistic circles,'' in the words of former French Interior
Minister Michel Poniatowski.
    But I did not do this. I told Krepkogorsky that I was a journalist,
not a government spokesman. I told him that I thought the problem
most Westerners had with the Soviet Union was the endless reports of
people being denied freedom of speech and even being thrown in jail
just for wanting to emigrate. Didn't the Gulag exist, I asked.
    ''I'm surprised you would say something like that,'' he answered.
''So many of these reports are just propaganda.'' He explained that
the Soviet mentality found it hard to accept that a citizen should
leave the country after the state had paid for his education. He said
that after losing 20 million people in World War II, the Soviets felt
they could not afford to let anyone leave.
    I asked more questions about repression. Krepkogorsky gave me more
answers, besides interjecting comments about contradictions in the
American political situation. The conversation went on for two hours.
I refused to take a doctrinaire position but I had little sympathy
for his doctrine that the Soviets are the world's hope for peace and,
in their way, have a free society.
    This seemed to exasperate Krepkogorsky. While I was wondering what
had happened to my UNESCO scoop, I think he was wondering how he had
miscalculated my political tendencies.
    I finally asked him why Soviet citizens were not as free to express
criticism of their government as he seemed anxious for me to do of
mine. Krepkogorsky said this was totally untrue and that some
citizens had even sent letters to Tass which had led to managers of
factories being changed. Ah yes, said I, but could they send the same
letters about Andropov? The answer was no. Krepkogorsky then
muttered, ''But who would want to?''
    I told him all this was fine, but that I couldn't think of one of my
friends who could live under such a system.
    ''OK,'' snapped back Krepkogorsky, ''but don't you tell us how to
live.''
    After this, the conversation dwindled to an end. We finally shook
hands, said good-bye. Krepkogorsky told me we should talk like this
again, that he would call me. But he never did.
    END
    
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