n019  0819  10 Apr 83
BC-SPIES(COX)
By THOMAS NOLAND
c. 1983 Cox News Service
    PARIS - ''I am the 48th spy,'' joked Vladimir Borev the night before
he flew voluntarily to the Soviet Union - after 47 of his countrymen,
including many personal friends, were forced to leave.
    Borev, a 29-year-old academician and one of only a few hundred
Soviet citizens residing in France, leavened his joking with
bitterness and contempt in an interview with Cox News Service in the
wake of France's expulsion of Soviet officials accused of espionage.
    ''What does France have worth spying on?'' he said. ''It used to be
the center of civilization. Now it's a small country, with nothing
left but wine, cheese and the Loire Valley castles.''
    The 47 targets of an unprecedented French counterintelligence
effort, who left the country last Tuesday, included the third-ranking
diplomat at the Soviet Embassy who reportedly headed KGB operations
in France.
    Another was the director of the cultural exchange program that
brought Borev here last fall for a year of research in mass
communications at the University of Paris.
    All 47 were accused of trying to pry loose secrets in military and
high-technology domains.
    Borev dodged questions about whether any of those expelled were
involved in spying. He echoed the official Soviet reaction in
pointing out that France has not made public any specific evidence
against them.
    ''The job of any diplomat is to find out about a country, to get to
know it,'' he said.
    He characterized the dramatic French action as a response to
domestic political considerations, which makes it laughable, he said,
instead of menacing.
    ''Large countries don't worry about small countries that try to
upset them,'' he remarked. ''France is a small country that
frequently angers others without calculating the consequences first.''
    While the consequences to Soviet-French relations remain to be seen,
the repercussions in France have been positive for President Francois
Mitterrand, who is said to have authored the move personally.
    Essentially, he managed to kill four birds with one stone, according
to admiring commentators on the left and the right.
    He solidified his position as an ''Atlanticist'' by showing the
United States that the presence of four junior-level Communists in
his Socialist-majority government does not prevent him from being
tough with the Russians. ''He demonstrated,'' according to leftist
parliamentarian Olivier Stirn, ''that he is not a prisoner of the
(French) Communists.''
    He reduced his critics on the right to responding with grudging nods
of approval, prompting lame explanations of why, in the 23 years of
rightist rule preceding Mitterrand's election in 1981, there was
never any comparable purge.
    He put the Communists in the embarrassing position of having to
assent to an action that infuriates the Soviet Union, to which they
have traditionally been more attached than any other Communist party
in Western Europe. Party leader Georges Marchais, at the risk of
sounding unpatriotic, limited himself to ''hoping this measure does
not lead to a deterioration in Franco-Soviet relations.''
    Finally, and perhaps most important, the move boosted Mitterrand's
popularity and that of the entire government after a difficult month
which saw significant Socialist losses in local elections, the
devaluation of the franc and the institution of unpopular austerity
measures.
    The timing could not have been better. The National Assembly opened
its debate on implementing the measures the day after a special
Aeroflot charter took the 47 Soviet officials and their families back
to Moscow.
    It was so good, in fact, and the government has been so
unforthcoming in explaining it, that speculation continues as to why
the expulsions came so unexpectedly and on such a grand scale.
    DST, the French counterespionage service, had been presenting
Mitterrand with mounting evidence of Soviet spying in the months
leading up to last Tuesday's stroke. Some observers argue that the
move was timed to coincide with recent expulsions of Soviet officials
on a much smaller scale in Britain, Italy and the Netherlands.
    Others say that the arrest two weeks ago of a young French
scientific researcher accused of passing information to the KGB was
''the drop of water that broke the dam,'' according to political
analyst Albert Le Roy.
    Patrick Guerrier, 25, was arrested in the Paris suburb of Meaux and
charged with handing over photocopied documents from an industrial
research center to a Soviet Embassy official identified as a KGB
agent.
    Another unanswered question involves a possible link to the KGB in
the mysterious death Feb. 15 of a high-ranking member of French
counterintelligence, Lt. Col. Bernard Nut, 47, found dead of an
apparent bullet-wound on a highway outside Nice.
    Nut reportedly had provided Italian authorities with information
concerning the involvement of the Bulgarian secret service in the
attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II on May 13, 1981.
    He also was instrumental in unmasking Col. Victor Pronin, a KGB
agent who was working undercover in the Rome office of Aeroflot.
Nut's body was discovered a few days after Pronin was arrested.
    Initially, his death was reported as a suicide brought on by
depression. But statements by his colleagues about his optimistic
frame of mind at the time of his death, coupled with the failure to
find a bullet in his corpse, has led to speculation that he was
murdered by a Soviet double agent.
    The government's only official explanation for the expulsion came
from the Ministry of the Interior Tuesday. A communique cited the
''multiplicity and gravity'' of incidents of Soviet espionage in
France, without going into detail.
    (Distributed by The New York Times News Service)
    
nyt-04-10-83 1121est
***************