Word: bloch
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Hostile surveillance" is a technique used by police to pressure a suspect by letting him know he is being watched. The FBI's investigation of Felix Bloch, the American diplomat suspected of espionage, by last week had mushroomed beyond hostility into full-blown hysteria. When Bloch and his daughter drove from suburban Chappaqua, N.Y., into Manhattan, they were followed by a posse of federal officers, news reporters, camera crews and, said Government sources, a carload of KGB agents...
Within days, Bloch became the most intensely hounded public official since Oliver North. Justice Department sources whispered that the Austrian-born Bloch was not only a Communist spy but also an Austrian lackey: as deputy chief of the American mission in Vienna, he had argued against barring Austrian President Kurt Waldheim from the U.S. A Viennese newspaper chimed in that Bloch was also a skirt chaser: police in Vienna interviewed a call girl with whom he had had a "friendship" for several years. In New York City Ronald Lauder, a former U.S. Ambassador to Austria and now a Republican candidate...
Even George Bush got into the act, telling reporters that the case against Bloch was a "very serious matter." That was as far as the Government was willing to go on an official level. The State Department confirmed that Bloch is being investigated for a "compromise of security which has occurred," but at week's end no charges had been filed against him, and he remained on paid leave from the department at an estimated $80,000 annual salary. Austrian officials confirmed that they were investigating a "phony Finn" who had traveled to Vienna several times on a forged passport...
...investigators and reporters jostled for scraps of information about yet another apparent traitor, did anyone care that under the law Bloch was still presumed innocent? His case may indeed prove to be the most serious spy scandal to come out of the State Department since the Alger Hiss affair. But, wrote columnist Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News, Bloch "is also a U.S. citizen, entitled to due process before execution." Charles Schmitz, vice president of the American Foreign Service Association, said the baying after Bloch was "terrible either way -- for his rights if innocent, for the case...
When news of the scandal broke, much of the case against Bloch still consisted of statements from intelligence sources and evidence gathered by methods that might not even be admissible at a trial. Under U.S. law, direct evidence is required of the transfer to foreigners of damaging secret information. Sources claim that Bloch, 54, a 30-year State Department veteran, was photographed passing a briefcase to a known Soviet agent in Paris. Reportedly, the same agent later tipped Bloch off to the investigation: "A bad virus is going around, and we believe you are now infected...