In an echo from another time, four senior Russian envoys will leave Washington during the coming days, with a further 46 to follow before the muggy summer descends on the Potomac. The Rumsfeld briefing coincides with a White House pledge that the US will push ahead with arms sales to Taiwan. For all the talk about a 'gridlock' that might follow his contested election victory, Bush has embarked on a brazen agenda of conservative policies at home and combative international gestures. Overseas, Bush has ig-nored European allies, bombed Iraq and spurned the North Koreans and Palestinians. But the most serious of these struts onto the international stage, about which he reportedly knew nothing until the final days of his campaign, are the gauntlets hurled last week into the faces of Russia and China.
Mutual expulsions are a carefully choreographed routine.
A diplomatic persona non grata is rarely, if ever, punished - they are 'caught' and sent packing while governments go after their own kind. But these are the largest such actions taken since the espionage 'bloodbath' of 1986 and the most aggressive since the collapse of the Soviet Union. But there is manipulation in these alerts. During Cold War days, a communication line ran between the KGB and CIA, 'the Gavrilov Channel', to maintain checks and balances on numbers operating on each side. Although CIA director George Tenet supported the expulsions, the agency itself was opposed, said one source, knowing that they would provoke retaliation and reduce CIA numbers in Russia.