Bigger Nato, Less Security? Ex-Warsaw Pact Nations Joining; Can Their Spies Be Bought?

As NATO membership for three Central European nations draws closer, officials in Washington and Western Europe are scrambling to deal with one of the most sensitive aspects of the alliance’s expansion: the trustworthiness of intelligence agencies in the former Soviet-bloc countries.

A basic question facing the Clinton administration as it pushed for the enlargement of NATO was whether the spy agencies in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which until eight years ago served Moscow, could be trusted to keep secrets.

Administration officials say they concluded that there had been enough house-cleaning of the three former Warsaw Pact intelligence agencies and enough distance since the end of Communism to ensure reliability.

But for others in Washington, at NATO headquarters in Brussels, and indeed for some officials in Warsaw and Budapest, the conclusions are not so cut and dried.

Because of its confidence, the administration rejected proposals to create an extra layer of screening for the people who will be sent by the three countries to NATO headquarters, NATO and administration officials said.

“The bottom line is that because they know the Russians, they are savvy about the hostile Russian threat, which is still there,” a senior official at the center of NATO policy in Washington said of the Central European countries. “It’s not the case of, ‘Oh God, they’re riddled with KGB agents; you can’t share anything with them.”’

The official said the selling of secrets was a danger in any intelligence service. Asked if the risk was higher in Central Europe, he said. “The bottom line is that professionals in counterintelligence say absolutely not.”

But some Western officials fear that the administration has bent over backward to treat the newcomers as equal partners, planning to share sensitive information with them in the same way it is shared with current NATO members. The administration has too easily accepted the Central Europeans’ arguments that they should not be treated as second-class citizens in the alliance, the critics assert.

“These guys may be loyal to Poland, but how easy is it to buy them now that ideology is not so important but money is?” asked an American intelligence official who has urged caution in joint American-Polish intelligence operations.

Hearings on the expansion of NATO began in Congress in the fall, and a Senate vote is expected in the spring. A two-thirds majority in the Senate is required, as well as approval by the legislatures of the 15 other NATO members.

The administration has said it expects to welcome the three countries into NATO in 1999, the 50th anniversary of the alliance’s founding. Russia opposed the expansion plan, but NATO has tried to reassure Moscow that it should not feel threatened by it and has set up a consultative council of the NATO and Russian foreign ministers.