Oleg Kalugin

Two U.S. senators on a fact-finding mission here said Monday that they have found information that could explain what happened to several hundred American prisoners of war and servicemen missing in action from World War II and the Vietnam and Korean wars. "We have been given assistance that could help us conceivably solve the fates of hundreds of Americans," Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) told reporters.

Tens of thousands of Muscovites, massing outside the Kremlin walls, poured contempt on the Communist Party on Sunday and called for wholesale defections from its ranks. In the style of an old-time religious revival meeting, speaker after speaker took the microphone to announce his decision to quit the party and call on former comrades to do the same. "Dear friends," renegade KGB Gen.

A useful operating principle for journal ists is that defectors should never be believed and that secret police are by definition untrustworthy. I would allow no national partiality in the application of these rules, but let's confine ourselves for the moment to the KGB. On Aug. 1, 1985, Vitaly Yurchenko, a colonel in the KGB, walked into the U.S. Embassy in Rome.

Beneath the political landscape of the nation's capital lies an underworld replete with bugging devices, exchanges of top-secret files and counterintelligence agents intent on gaining the upper hand over their archenemies on the global stage. At least that's the scenario laid out for espionage fans who flock to SpyDrive, a bus tour of secret spying locations around Washington.

Konstantin Demakhin never fooled anyone, of course. When he drove seven consecutive British ambassadors around Moscow, none was ever naive enough to let any state secrets slip to a chauffeur who might as well have worn a "KGB stamp of approval" on his forehead.

Secrecy is its business, but the International Spy Museum opened very publicly Friday with news crews swarming the first day of the nation's only museum devoted to divulging the tricks of the Stasi, the KGB and the CIA. A placard in the museum quotes Winston Churchill: "In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies." And spies, apparently, should be attended by a few cool gizmos to get the job done.

A senior Russian official in the military-industrial complex has confessed to spying for Britain and has been charged with treason, Russian officials announced Tuesday. The bombshell, widening the espionage war between Moscow and the West, comes just when U.S. officials thought the exchange of unpleasantness over the alleged spying of CIA official Aldrich H. Ames for the Kremlin was over. On Monday, Russia expelled a U.S.

Seeking to stand tall under the glaring light of glasnost , Bulgaria has ordered its spies in from the cold and furled its poison-tipped umbrellas. The Balkan nation that once directed one of the world's most sinister secret services has declared a formal end to all hostile intelligence activity and opened its archives to foreign scrutiny.

Just when the Cold War had been officially pronounced over, the abrupt resignation of Eduard A. Shevardnadze as Soviet foreign minister, coupled with his warnings of an impending "dictatorship" in Moscow, has cast doubt on the whole future of the Soviet Union and of East-West relations. Endless speculation has ensued in the West about Shevardnadze's speech. Most of the speculation so far, however, has focused on the wrong issues.

The Cold War may be dead and gone, but old-time espionage is alive and well. That's the lesson of a startling series of spy-vs.-spy capers in the last week. The barrage of bizarre revelations about low-rent tradecraft and high-tech skulduggery offered a rare peek into the shadowy world of special ops and secret agents. Indeed, the clock itself seemed to have turned back more than a decade. And that's just fine with America's most senior spooks.