THE FELIX BLOCH AFFAIR

Published: May 13, 1990

(Page 2 of 7)

For now, Felix Bloch remains in limbo. Three months ago, the State Department moved to dismiss him. The F.B.I., convinced he is guilty, hopes to put him in prison for life. President Bush has publicly called the case ''very serious.'' The Government's counterintelligence agents believe that Bloch passed classified documents, not postage stamps, to Reino Gikman. Last summer, a Federal grand jury opened an investigation, but so far the Government has been unable to make its case.

As deputy chief of mission in Vienna, Bloch had access to a broad range of classified secrets, including encoded cable traffic, C.I.A. and State Department intelligence reports, the identities of C.I.A. officers in the embassy and, possibly, of some of their sources. Bloch, a senior State Department official noted, was a Foreign Service officer for 31 years. ''You may ask what he knew,'' the official said, ''but a better question is what didn't he know?''

Bloch was not branded a spy suspect solely by reporters. Minutes after John McWethy, a resourceful and diligent correspondent for ABC News, broke the story last July 21, the State Department confirmed that Bloch had been placed on leave, his building pass revoked, and that a security breach ''has occurred'' - astonishing language that virtually convicted Bloch without a trial.

IT BEGAN, ACCORDING TO BLOCH, WITH A PHONE CALL. Pierre Bart, he says, ''had contacted me some months earlier at the behest of a mutual friend in Vienna.''

We are in the back room at I Ricchi, an upscale Washington restaurant not far from Bloch's condominium. We started with the garlic bread and now he is working on his swordfish. He has joined me in a glass of pinot grigio, although Bloch drinks very little and doesn't smoke.

I ask the name of the man in Vienna. ''I can tell you the name,'' Bloch replies. ''But he's dead.'' Bloch smiles. ''He's been dead for four, five years. Willy Loman.''

I look at him incredulously. An Arthur Miller character has wandered into the Bloch case? ''Lomax,'' he corrects himself. ''It was Lomax. An expatriate Brit who worked for the U.S. Embassy.''

How did he know that the dead Englishman gave Bart his name? ''That's what Pierre told me.'' Later, in Vienna, I tried to find out more about ''Willy Lomax.'' I discovered that no one named Lomax had ever worked for the United States Embassy. But several former Embassy employees remember a colleague named Richard Lomas, an Englishman and former British army officer who worked in the economic section. A tall man, about six feet, with a mustache and gray hair, Lomas had arrived in Vienna with the British occupation troops in 1945, married an Austrian woman who hoped for a career as an opera(Continued on Page 38) singer, and stayed. He shared Bloch's love of music and, like Bloch, was often seen at the opera. He had retired in 1978, the embassy press officer said.

Although accounts of the Bloch case have focused on the meeting in Paris, Bloch told me he had met with Bart/Gikman three times last year, in three cities in Europe. I asked Bloch how the first contact came: by phone? He nodded. They met, Bloch said, not in Vienna but ''in another European city,'' in the early part of 1989. Bloch would not discuss any more details of what he said was his first meeting with Bart, but when I asked if he had given him stamps at this meeting, he replied: ''Yes.''

By then, Bloch had returned from Vienna, where he served from 1980 to 1987, and was back in the State Department as director of the office of regional economic and political affairs in the European bureau. His long-sought ambassadorship now seemed out of reach. He was only 1 of 11 office directors in the bureau and, at age 53, his career in the Foreign Service no longer looked promising.

On May 11, Reino Gikman - the man Bloch refers to as ''Pierre Bart'' - left Vienna on a trip, accompanied by Helga Hobart, a dark-haired, handsome widow in her late 40's. Gikman, who told friends he was a Finn, carried a Finnish passport that gave his age as 59. For the past five years he and Helga had lived in her little cottage at 169 Rosenhugelstrasse, in Hietzing, in Vienna's 13th district.

They flew to Paris and checked into the Saphir. Two days later, Gikman, now metamorphosed into Pierre Bart, telephoned Bloch at his apartment in Washington. The F.B.I. was listening. Sometime that spring, by undisclosed means, Western intelligence agents had picked up Gikman's trail. Their task was complicated, officials say, by the fact that there really is a stamp collector called Pierre Bart, whose identity Gikman at times adopted as cover.

As it happened, Bloch was about to leave for France on official business. That afternoon, he flew to Paris, arriving early on Sunday, May 14, and checked into the Hotel Pullman St.-Honore, a small Right Bank hotel.

After delivering the bag to Gikman at the Meurice, Bloch attended a meeting of economic officers the next day, then flew to Madrid on May 16 for a European Community conference and returned to Washington.

The meeting in Paris, however, was not his last with Reino Gikman. Their next encounter was to cause considerable problems for the F.B.I. and the C.I.A.