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Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RDP96-00788R000100330001-5 LOS ANGELES TIMES U.S. Suspects Soviets Ordered Envoy Beaten By ROBERT GILLETTE, Times Staff Writer MOSCOW—An American diplo- mat was attacked and beaten by several unidentified men in Lenin- grad last month in an assault that “US. officials believe was organized by Soviet authorities in an atmos- phere of increasingly cold relations with the United States. The diplomat, Ronald A. Harms, was not seriously injured in the -attack,. which was. said to have occurred April 17. According to sources familiar with the incident, the State Department and the U.S. Embassy vigorously protested to Soviet officials in Washington and Moscow. The assault on the diplo- mat. was not publicly disclosed. According to the sources, who asked not to be identified, the indident occurred as Harms, one ofa dozen American diplomats serving in the U.S. Consulate in Leningrad, left a restaurant where he had met with a Soviet acquaintance.- Several unidentified men in civil- ian clothes were said to have sur- rounded the 35-year-old diplomat on‘ the sidewalk, beating him in plain view of passers-by. Harms immediately hailed a uniformed po- lice officer to report the attack, but the officer is said to have shown little interest. According to the sources, the police officer asked Harms whether hethad struck back at his assailants. When told he had not, the officer replied, “It’s a good thing you didn’t.” A spokesman for the U.S. Embas- “sy in Moscow confirmed that details of the account were “substantially correct,” but he declined to elabo- rate, saying that ‘we felt it would not be appropriate to go public with this incident.” Harms could not be reached for comment. Harms has served since October, 1982, at the consulate in Leningrad, where his duties include the sensi- tive—and, to the Soviets,. unwel- come—task of following human rights issues. Both Harms and his wife, Norma, hold the rank of consul in Leningrad, the country’s sec- ond-largest city and the only U.S. outpost in the Soviet Union outside of Moscow. SPECIAL EDITION -- TERRORISM -- 26 JUNE 1984 30 May 1984 Pg. 1 The assault is believed to be the first such attack here on an Ameri- can diplomat since 1981, when Dan- iel Fried, a vice-consul in Lenin- grad. was beaten in one of the city’s subway stations. Fried .was also assigned to the human rights post in Leningrad. In the official Soviet view, Westerners who maintain contacts with reli- gious or political dissidents in the Soviet Union do so for the purpose of fomenting subversion. and elicit- ing “slander” of the Soviet system. Western diplomats-note that in the relative. isolation of Leningrad, 400 miles north of Moscow, Soviet police. and KGB agents have long operated witha freer hand against the small céfimunity of foreign diplomats: Supyeillance of diplomats and the occaélenal traveling corre- spondent is more intense and obvi- ous in Leningrad than Moscow, and instances. of petty harassment— from police detention to minor van- dalism of foreign cars—tend to be more frequent. Last August, the Soviets expelled a vice consul at the U.S. Consulate in Leningrad after accusing him of spying. A month later, State De- partment spokesman Alan Romberg disclosed that the United States had protested what he called the “phys- ical maltreatment” of the diplomat, Lon David Augustenborg, and his wife Denise, before their expulsion. Romberg did not elaborate. The Soviet Union regularly and publicly protests incidents involv- ing its own diplomats in the United States, invariably branding them as terrorism perpetrated by American authorities. Last Feb. 24, the official Tass news agency said, three sticks of dynamite were thrown into the housing compound of the Soviet mission to the United Nations ‘in New York, destroying one car and damaging two others, Attributing the attack. to the Jewish Defense League, Tass said the State Department had ignored a telephone warning and “in so doing actually connives at the perpetra- tion of such acts of terrorism.” The assault on the U:S. diplomat. in Leningrad occurred amid in- creasingly shrill press attacks on the United States, punctuated earli-, er this month by the Olympic boycott, as Moscow has turned a cold shoulder on overtures from the Reagan Administration for renewed talks on nuclear arms control. Three American diplomats. in Moscow who follow human rights NEW YORK TIMES 31 May 1984 Pg. 10 U.S, ASSAILS SOVIET ON ENVOY ASSAULT By STEPHEN ENGELBERG Spectal to The New York Times WASHINGTON, May 30 — The State Department has filed a formal protest with the Soviet Union about an assault on an American diplomat in Leningrad by several young men last month, offj- cials of the department said today. The officials said a ‘‘strong protest”’ was lodged in both Washington and Moscow over the April 17 attack on Ronald Harms, a United States Consul in Leningrad. John Hughes, the State Department spokesman, said Mr. Harms was punched by a group of unidentified as- sailants after leaving a restaurant in downtown Leningrad. Mr. Hughes said the protests over the April 17 incident were not publicized because the State Department has a “standard practice” against doing so in order to protect the security of the diplomats involved. There has been no Soviet response to the protest nor has there been any sign that those responsible were apprehend- ed, a State Department official said. The State Department says it does not know why Mr. Harms was assault- ed, but one official remarked: ‘You have to assume when a diplomat .is roughed up there’s some official con- nection. It’s otherwise such an orderly society.” “There was no skin broken and no bruises,” he said, “but he was physi- cally mishandled and that’s outra- geous.”’ . Last year a vice consul in Leningrad was expelled from the Soviet Union after being charged with spying. The United States later publicly protested the physical mistreatment of the vice - consul, Lon David Augustenborg, and his wife, Denise. ms That incident occurred less than two weeks after a Soviet fighter shot down a South Korean airliner in ember. It also came on the heels of the expul- sion, on charges of espionage, of more than 100 Russians from Western tries. cases were accused recently. of being CIA agents. And iast Friday's edition of Red Star, the armed forces newspaper, accused seven American, British and Canadian military attaches of photographiag industrial installations in Leningrad and penetrating deep into zones closed to foreigners. No action appears to have been taken against any of the diplomats, however. Approved For Release 2000/08/07 : CIA-RBP96-00788R000100330001-5