Americans Accused Of Spying In France Five, Including Ex-Cia Station Chief, Accused Of Espionage

France has accused five Americans, including the former CIA station chief here and his deputy, of political and economic espionage and asked them to leave the country immediately, French officials said on Wednesday.

The other Americans who were asked to leave were two other CIA agents, who are listed in diplomatic jobs on the roster of the U.S. Embassy, and a woman working as an undercover CIA agent who lacks diplomatic status, according to an article published on Wednesday in Le Monde and confirmed by diplomats.

The Americans were accused of trying to bribe high-ranking French government officials into disclosing France’s negotiating position on movies and entertainment in recent global trade talks, secrets about French domestic politics, and telecommunications.

The spectacle of one ally publicly demanding the withdrawal of another’s diplomats for spying plunged relations between France and the United States into one of the strangest crises of their history.

Pamela Harriman, the U.S. ambassador to France, visited the office of Prime Minister Edouard Balladur to discuss the affair on Wednesday afternoon, American Embassy officials said. She emerged impassive after 30 minutes and said she would make no comment.

In an unusual joint statement, the French Interior Ministry and Foreign Ministry said that the French government had never intended the affair to become public. But they said the American Embassy had been asked to withdraw the diplomats.

The statement did not say how many diplomats were involved, and some French reports said there may have been as many as six.

In Washington, the State Department described the allegations as unjustified and said it was reviewing the incident. It spoke only of the accusations in the French press.

“We regard allegations in the French press, citing French government sources, concerning purported official U.S. activities, as being unwarranted,” a department spokeswoman, Christine Shelly, said.

“The handling of this matter in France is inconsistent with the approach that allies have taken to resolve sensitive matters in the past,” she said.

“There is no reason for expelling any Americans, nor is the French government calling for it.”

Other State Department officials, saying that the French planned no expulsions, added privately that the American officials would be moved out of France according to their regular rotations.

A spokeswoman at the American Embassy in Paris, asked how many of the four embassy diplomats were still in France, said only, “All of them are working or have worked at the embassy.” She gave no further elaboration.

Earlier in the day, Balladur tried to treat the matter lightly. “The French people are friends of the American people and the French government is a friend of the American government,” he said. “Events like that occur regularly on both sides of the Atlantic.”

But seldom, if ever, have there been such spectacular sparks between allies, according to old CIA hands and diplomats. Many said they could not recall anything to match the incident since the height of the cold war, when Moscow and Washington periodically cleaned out each other’s spy networks. This time, the protagonists were officials who presumably dealt with each other regularly on such common threats as international terrorism and organized crime.

A senior Administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Wednesday night that the French government had fed the spying story to the news media in a background briefing. He speculated that the main aim was to move the spotlight away from a wiretapping scandal that has embarrassed the French government.

The French interior minister, Charles Pasqua, has been under fire this week for authorizing secret wiretaps, and the stir has set back Balladur’s campaign to succeed President Francois Mitterrand in elections this spring.

“We’re not speculating, but the issue may be related to Pasqua’s political fortunes,” the senior administration official said. “In France, the speculation is exactly that, in relation to the timing and the handling of the incident.”

The official said the French government’s background briefing with the news media about the accused spies was “totally unprecedented.”

“We’re declining to get into the substance of the allegations except to say they’re vastly overblown,” the official added.

Le Monde also speculated that Pasqua, who is in charge of the counterespionage service, would not be displeased by a report that distracted attention from the wiretapping scandal.