President Boris Yeltsin said Thursday he had for the first time used his hot-line link to his generals when Norway fired a scientific missile that sparked a major security alert in Russia.


In comments to Interfax, Yeltsin also suggested that NATO-member Norway and its Western defense partners may have been trying to test Russia's military readiness.


"I indeed yesterday used for the first time my 'black' suitcase with the button which is always carried with me," Yeltsin said referring to Wednesday's incident.


"I linked up instantly with the defense minister, with all those military leader-generals whom I need, and we tracked the path of this rocket from beginning to end."


Yeltsin did not challenge Norway's official explanation that the missile, which came down in the sea off Spitzbergen more than 1,000 kilometers from the Russian mainland, was a research rocket fired under a scientific program partly funded by the U.S. space agency NASA.


But his claim that the incident triggered a major defense alert in Moscow was certain to provoke head-scratching in the West about the Russian military's crisis procedures and the level of advice being offered to Yeltsin.


It was not clear whether Yeltsin's communications suitcase was also the portable nuclear command system which can unleash Russia's atomic forces. The U.S. president has a similar portable system dubbed the "football."


Yeltsin made his comments at the start of a one-day trip to Lipetsk, south of Moscow, to a senior journalist from Interfax, the Russian agency which set alarm bells ringing with its initial report of the incident Wednesday.


Apparently referring to Norway, Yeltsin said: "They, of course, did not expect us to spot it because the rocket was not so big, but we spotted it straight away and determined the place where it came down -- a good enough distance from our shores."


Asked by Interfax deputy director Vyacheslav Terekhov what the aim of the launch might have been, he said: "Somebody perhaps decided to test us because the media is saying all the time that our army is weak.


"We knew in a minute where the rocket flew from, where and at what speed it headed and where it would land or splash down," he said, adding that the armed forces had to be thanked for their efficiency.


His comments immediately revived speculation over an incident which was rapidly being dismissed as a misunderstanding between a journalist and his source.


Diplomats said the comments were all the more puzzling in that they ran counter to remarks Wednesday by Russia's newly-appointed ambassador to Oslo, Yury Fokin, who said the incident "was nothing but a misunderstanding."


Norway said within an hour of the initial Interfax report Wednesday that the missile had been fired from Andoya island off North Cape as part of a civilian research program and went down as planned in the Spitzbergen region.


Dag Halvorsen, a senior diplomat at the Norwegian Embassy in Moscow, said Thursday that the Russians had been notified Dec. 21 of the planned launch.


"In view of that there should have been no cause for alarm," he said. Halvorsen added that Norway was seeking clarification of Yeltsin's comments from the Foreign Ministry.


Other diplomats noted that Yeltsin made no suggestion that Moscow would make any official protest about the incident -- a fact that suggested Yeltsin might have been blowing up the incident for internal political purposes.


He used the incident to make a back-handed compliment to the armed forces, whose leadership has been under fire because of the ill-prepared military campaign in the breakaway Chechen Republic, in which hundreds, if not thousands of civilians and military personnel, have died.