A 30-year State Department veteran who recently served as the No. 2 official at the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, Austria, and now heads a division dealing with European affairs is suspected of spying for the Soviet Union, federal officials confirmed Friday.
The official is Felix S. Bloch, who sources said was videotaped giving a briefcase of materials to a Soviet agent. A State Department spokesman confirmed Friday night that Bloch had been placed on administrative leave and was the subject of an FBI investigation."The Department of State's Bureau of Diplomatic Security is cooperating with an FBI inquiry into reports of illegal activities involving (Bloch) and agents of a foreign intelligence service," said the spokesman, Richard Boucher.
Officials said the case involved a potentially serious breach of highly sensitive information that would damage U.S. national security interests.
Bloch, 53, currently serves in Washington as director of the Office of Regional Political-Economic Affairs in the State Department's Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs, the bureau that draws up American policy toward Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
Bloch's own unit is in charge of U.S. policy toward the European Economic Community. But one State Department official said Friday night that as an office director, Bloch would also have had access to materials on State Department deliberations on high-technology items the United States and its European allies would allow to be sold to the Soviet Union.
While the second-ranking official in Vienna, Bloch had access to secret communications sent to and from the embassy.
"He had access to top-secret, compartmentalized information and was at a level where it all comes together to be fed into the decision-making process," one federal official said.
Another official said Bloch was not directly involved in Soviet policy or in arms-control negotiations with the Soviet Union.
Bloch has not been arrested, and a source familiar with the investigation said that much of what happens in the investigation depends on any explanation he may give to FBI agents. "He has some tall explaining to do" about the incident in which he was allegedly videotaped giving a briefcase to a Soviet official, the source said.
It was learned that the FBI has been interviewing Bloch's friends and associates for more than a week. The news of the investigation was first made public last night by ABC News.
Until approximately two years ago, Bloch served as deputy chief of mission, the second-ranking official, at the U.S. Embassy in Austria.
Bloch was the senior foreign service officer in the U.S. Embassy, serving under two ambassadors who were political appointees of the Reagan administration and had little previous experience in foreign policy. The first was Helene A. von Damm, who went to Vienna after serving as President Reagan's secretary and administrative assistant. The second was businessman Ronald Lauder.
"Under a politically appointed ambassador, it's the DCM (deputy chief of mission) who runs the show and knows what's happening," a senior American intelligence analyst said.
Bloch fell under suspicion two years ago while serving at the U.S. Embassy in Austria because superiors believed that he maintained unusually close ties with the Austrian government, sources said.
He was eventually asked to leave that post by then-Ambassador Lauder, according to sources close to Lauder.
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High-ranking spy?
As the deputy chief of mission in the U.S. Embassy in Austria, State Department official Felix S. Bloch was the highest-ranking career foreign service officer there.
If Bloch, now on administrative leave from the department, is charged with espionage, he would become one of the highest-ranking U.S. officials ever alleged to have passed secrets to another country, diplomatic experts said Friday. "All of the ones, at least in recent years, were at a much lower level" said one observer.