Hi, There are two unanswered reports of this error (below) in read.spss() when used with a .por file. I had the same problem and in order to successfully read the file into R I downloaded spss, saved the data as .dat tab-delimited, and then used read.table(). The point is that spss successfully read the same .por data file (the Polity II data freely available from ICPSR) that R couldn't read. So, I assume this is a bug in R.
politydata<-read.spss("polityii.por")
Error in read.spss("polityii.por") : error reading portable-file
dictionary
In addition: Warning message:
Expected variable count record in: read.spss("polityii.por")