Oleg Kalugin

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.

One of the most enduring riddles of the Vietnam War is: Did the Vietnamese release all their American prisoners, and if not, why not? The question of whether American POWs remained behind has become the source of a vast body of literature and popular legend, ranging from books such as "The Bamboo Cage" to movie dramas such as "Rambo." The Atlantic Monthly devoted its cover story last December to an essay entitled "The POW/MIA Myth."

Reaching back into the dark world of Cold War espionage, the FBI on Friday arrested a former soldier once assigned to the super-secret National Security Agency on charges of spying for the Soviet Union, plucking him out of an obscure life in rural Pennsylvania some 20 years after his alleged betrayal had ended. The FBI arrested Robert Stephan Lipka, 50, at his home in Manor Township, Pa.

It was soon after dark in the spring of 1968 when the car slowly pulled to a stop on Riverside Drive, just north of New York's 122nd Street. A couple emerged and walked toward the Gothic grayness of Grant's Tomb. A discrete distance away, in another car, FBI agents watched as the pair, Peter and Ingeborg Fisher, turned toward the woods and disappeared. Moments later, Ingeborg reappeared, shortly followed by Peter. Three hours later, back at their home in Upper Darby, Pa.

THE COLD WAR was supposed to have ended 15 years ago, but the death in London of Alexander V. Litvinenko presents Scotland Yard with more than your average murder mystery. The former Russian spy and fierce critic of the Kremlin was poisoned. But how and by whom? The tale began Nov. 1 at itsu, a busy London sushi restaurant near Piccadilly Circus that features a Madame Butterfly Zinger, Squirrels Dreams and something called Bang Bang Free Range Chicken. Poison is definitely not on the menu.

Armed with a virtual blank check from the Bush administration, the CIA is pouring operatives and money into and around Afghanistan, and has decided to pay a bounty to anyone who helps the agency capture or kill Osama bin Laden, officials said Wednesday. Within the CIA, the rapid mobilization is called a "surge." Scores of intelligence officers and analysts, apparently including some recalled from retirement, are being dispatched to outposts in Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and elsewhere.

Russian republic leader Boris N. Yeltsin, mounting a new challenge to Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, laid out a broad program of action Friday, calling for creation of a coalition government and rapid moves toward radical economic reform. His bass voice booming for 90 minutes through the airy Grand Kremlin Palace hall, Yeltsin told the Russian republic's Parliament that Gorbachev's reforms had turned out to be "not restructuring but rather the last phase of the stagnation period."

The KGB, the Soviet security police, opened the doors of its headquarters at Moscow's infamous Lubyanka Prison to the press Tuesday in its gathering campaign to demonstrate that President Mikhail S. Gorbachev's reforms have changed even it. "Our activities must be increasingly subjected to public control, and in protecting the state we must strive to protect human rights as well," Maj. Gen. Alexander N.

Palms sweating, black brows twitching, fingers clamped on a harsh Belomor cigarette, Vladimir Molchanov mumbled through the material he would read aloud, within minutes, for 150 million viewers of "Vremya," the nightly news program. He fiddled with his tie, put on his jacket, listened to frantic commands and questions thrown out by the staff, ran a comb through his silver-streaked hair, and emerged, poised and authoritative, on the flickering screen: Soviet television's premier gentleman.

In a move to break up the KGB as the Soviet Union's once all-powerful intelligence and security force, President Mikhail S. Gorbachev on Monday appointed his chief foreign policy adviser to direct its foreign intelligence activities and place them under an independent state agency. Yevgeny M.