"Include the Women"

ESPIONAGE

Spies, like hats, come in different sizes and shapes. Two current cases concerning Soviet spies illustrate the two main models now in fashion: sneak-thief traitor and suave professional.

Dispatch Case. The traitor is John W. Butenko, 39, American-born son of Russian immigrants, honors graduate in engineering, trusted employee in New Jersey of the International Telephone and Telegraph Corp., and holder of top security clearance as a key electronics technician dealing with counter-strike operations of the Strategic Air Command. Trailed for six months by FBI agents, Butenko was picked up in his automobile at a deserted railroad station one night in October 1963. With him were two Soviet diplomats (since expelled from the U.S. after invoking diplomatic immunity), and Igor Ivanov, a "chauffeur" for Amtorg, the Soviet trade agency.

Butenko, a hypertensive bachelor, insisted that he was trying to get information about relatives behind the Iron Curtain. Witnesses testified that Butenko's dispatch case, containing two secret documents, was found in the Russians' car near by, along with a copying machine, a radio and a cigarette case, each concealing a camera, and an electronic signaling device. In Newark last week a Federal Court jury found Butenko and Ivanov guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage, and Butenko alone of failing to register as an agent for a foreign government. Sentence has not yet been passed, but both men could get the death penalty.

Piece of Cake. The professional is Colonel Stig Erik Constans Wennerstroem, 58, tall, handsome, dashing Swedish diplomat, air attache for his embassy in Washington from 1952 to 1957. He was arrested by Swedish agents in Stockholm last year, and admitted that he had been a Soviet spy since 1948. In testimony provided by the Swedes to the U.S. Government and released last week, Wennerstroem casually disclosed that spying in the U.S. was a piece of cake. He perfected the art of name-dropping in the presence of impressionable people, and cultivated military and diplomatic officers and their wives at country clubs and cocktail parties.

"If it is desired to have closer contacts in the U.S.," he explained, "it is necessary, in most cases, to include the women." The wives, he said, "liked to speak to me and my wife. This, in turn, impressed their husbands' assistants whom I had not met yet. When I had made their acquaintance, I concentrated on those who had contact with their highest chiefs."

Wennerstroem's chief function was to supply Moscow with information on technological advances in a variety of fields. He traveled freely to industrial plants to inspect production and facilities and, because he represented a neutral nation and frequently had been introduced "from the top by the highest chief," was almost never asked for verification of his security clearance. He passed most of his information on to his contact by means of microfilm, which he transferred with a hearty handshake wherever the two had agreed to meet. He and his Soviet contact even practiced the handshake ("He had very large hands, which greatly facilitated the procedure"), often met at parties or at clandestine rendezvous. Once he delivered microfilm by handshake at the Pentagon itself.

Out of Pocket. Another method for transfer was used when Wennerstroem attended diplomatic receptions at the Soviet embassy: "One arrives wearing an overcoat. The coat is hung on a numbered hanger far in the rear. Remembering the number, you enter the reception room, acting normally. When you meet your contact, you must greet him as usual and occasion to tell him the number. You separate, and the contact goes to the coat hangers and gets the material in the pockets." Wennerstroem liked to use hangers No. 24 and 25.

He is now serving a life sentence in a Swedish prison.

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