NATION : FBI Tried to ‘Pressure’ Bloch Through Family, Daughter Says
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NEW YORK — FBI agents intent on arresting suspected Soviet spy Felix Bloch attempted to turn his family against him, his daughter says.
“They wanted my mother as the star witness. They were grasping at straws; they were desperate,” Andrea Bloch, 26, said in today’s New York Post. The agents threatened to charge her mother, Lucille Bloch, as a co-conspirator, Andrea Bloch charged.
“They were trying to pressure my father into breaking by using us,” she said. “They wanted to make us so miserable that it would make him miserable.”
The FBI’s plan “totally backfired,” she said, despite the strains it put on the family.
Bloch, once the No. 2 man in the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, was followed by FBI agents for months after he was videotaped purportedly passing a briefcase to a Soviet official in Vienna.
The surveillance has been scaled back recently, and Bloch has not been charged with any crime.
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