WASHINGTON - Just when the end of the Cold War seemed to have killed off spy-mania, the letters 'KGB' are back on the agenda of the U. S. presidential campaign.


President George Bush's Republicans, still trailing by an average 10 points in the opinion polls with the election only four weeks away, have begun floating the dark hint that the Democratic candidate Bill Clinton may have been recruited by Soviet intelligence.


Clinton on Monday night laughed off the idea that his week-long trip to Leningrad and Moscow in January 1970, a time when he was involved in the campus protests of the Vietnam War, was anything but a student's tourism.


"This is silly and it is baloney. They must be getting pretty desperate", he said of the Republican attacks.


"It would be pretty sad to be president of the United Stales for four years, and the best you can do in a campaign for re-election is to say things about your opponent that aren't true".


Clinton described his trip to the Soviet Union as part of a break during his studies at Oxford.


"It was the first week on 1970, and actually relationships were thawing between our two countries", he said. "I was a student in England and I took a 40-day trip across northern Europe, through all the Scandinavian countries, spent Christmas with a family friend in Helsinki. and then I went into Russia and spent a week and came out through Czechoslovakia and then went back to England.


"And I had an interesting week there. But I paid for my own trip. Nobody paid for it. I was just a student there. As far as I know, I didn't meet with the KGB".


Clinton's visit has been the focus of a campaign of late-night speeches to an empty House of Representatives by a group of rightist Republican congressmen. Led by California's passionately anti-Communist Representative Robert Dornan, they are voicing dark hints about "unanswered questions on who he met and why".


The Republicans are pushing the theory that the young Clinton went to Moscow as part of a personal campaign against the Vietnam War. Their references to "unanswered questions" have been attempts to imply that he might have fit the KGB's profile as a suitable agent of influence for recruitment.


"It is yet another chapter of a deception and deceit that has characterized Clinton's life", a Bush campaign spokeswoman, Toria Clarke, said Monday. "We would join in the chorus of people asking Clinton to come clean on his draft status and his anti-war activities".


Angelo Codevilla, a former Republican staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee staff, put this spin on it: "If Bill Clinton's travel was not supervised and arranged by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, then he was the only one".


Clinton is now clear favorite to win the election on Nov. 3 and take advantage of America's economic recession to become the first Democrat to get back into the White House since Jimmy Carter in 1976.


The return last week to the race


of the Texas billionaire Ross Perot, which had been expected to weaken Clinton by splitting the anti-Bush vote, has had little effect, according to the opinion polls.


As the election moves into its final month, the American political tradition of dirty tricks seems to have loomed again, with the FBI launching an investigation into the ripping out of pages from Governor Clinton's passport file at the U. S. State Department.


Clinton's passport file was -checked after two newspapers and a television network submitted Freedom of Information applications to see the dossier. They were chasing down rumors that Clinton may have applied for British citizenship while at Oxford in an attempt to avoid the Vietnam draft. Clinton's staff dismiss the idea as "wacky", and none of his Oxford contemporaries say the idea was ever raised.


"They are pretty good at starting stuff, those guys", Clinton commented of the Republican campaign against him. "This dog won't hunt. I have never been interested in changing citizenship, and I didn't even know there was a State Department file on me".