MOSCOW - An unidentified spokesman for a Russian
secret service told Interfax last Friday that Western
intelligence agencies - particularly those of the United
States - have stepped up their work against Russia.
"Among all the special services involved in intelligence
activity against Russia over the last five years, the
most active has been US intelligence," the source said.
The statement was made in connection with the
recent conviction on espionage charges of researcher
Igor Sutyagin, who was sentenced on April 7 to 15 years'
imprisonment for spying for the United States.
Sutyagin, a former researcher with the Institute
of the USA and Canada, was arrested by Federal Security
Service (FSB) agents in Kaluga on October 27, 1999. He
was accused of passing state secrets to a British
consulting firm that the FSB charges was a front
organization for US intelligence. Throughout his ordeal,
Sutyagin has maintained his innocence, saying he never
had access to secret information and that all the
information he provided was culled from open sources.
Last Friday, the new political movement
Committee 2008, which was formed recently by a group of
liberal politicians and journalists, released a
statement calling the Sutyagin verdict "unjust and
biased because the trial failed to establish that
secrets were indeed passed or that the foreign citizens
with whom Sutyagin was linked worked for foreign
intelligence services", polit.ru reported.
The
same day, Institute of the USA and Canada director
Sergei Rogov described the Sutyagin sentence as "overly
severe", adding that he hoped the Supreme Court would
"revise it", lenta.ru reported. "I am displeased that
the institute has been depicted in the mass media as a
nest of the CIA [US Central Intelligence Agency]," Rogov
said, "and by the fact that we have drawn the attention
of the intelligence services. But how can one judge the
level of the interest of the secret services [to the
institute]? I cannot say that that interest has
increased in recent years."
The Sutyagin trial
is just one of a spate of similar cases involving
researchers, journalists, diplomats and former security
agents accused of having improper contacts with
foreigners. Here are some of the major cases from recent
years.
1996: Navy Captain Aleksandr
Nikitin was arrested and accused of divulging state
secrets in a report he prepared for the Norwegian
ecological organization Bellona on the radioactive
contamination of the Barents Sea by the Northern Fleet.
The St Petersburg Municipal Court acquitted him in
December 1999.
1997: Military journalist
and navy Captain Grigorii Pasko was charged with giving
state secrets to Japanese journalists. In December 2001,
he was sentenced to four and a half years in prison. He
was granted early release from prison in January 2003.
1998: Senior diplomat Valentin Moiseev
was arrested and charged with spying for South Korea. In
1999, a Moscow court convicted him and sentenced him to
12 years' imprisonment. That sentence was later reduced
to four and a half years.
1999: Pacific
Ocean Studies Institute Professor Vladimir Shchurov was
arrested in Vladivostok and accused of disclosing state
secrets to China. Last August, he was convicted and
sentenced to two years' probation. He was immediately
released under an amnesty.
Businessman Viktor Kalyadin was arrested and accused
of spying for the United States. He was convicted and
sentenced to 14 years' imprisonment in October 2001.
2000: The Baltic Fleet Military Court
sentenced navy Captain Sergei Velichko to five years'
imprisonment after convicting him of spying for Sweden.
Velichko reportedly confessed that he had worked for
Swedish intelligence since 1996.
Retired US Naval Intelligence officer Edmund Pope
was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment by a Moscow
court for spying for the United States. He was pardoned
by President Vladimir Putin and sent back to the United
States.
Bauman Moscow State Technical University Professor
Anatolii Babkin was arrested in August 2000 together
with Edmund Pope on charges of spying for the United
States. In February 2003 he was convicted and given
eight years' probation.
2001: Krasnoyarsk
Technological Institute physicist Valentin Danilov was
arrested and accused of spying for China. He was
acquitted by a jury last December.
2003:
Former FSB officer and lawyer Mikhail Trepashkin was
arrested and accused of revealing state secrets. His
case is now before the Moscow Military District Court.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta on April 7 published a
primer of 16 such cases.
Some analysts believe
that Sutyagin was unlucky in that he was arrested in
1999, when Putin was FSB director. FSB officers now are
taking particular pains to show that cases developed
during that period were sound. However, there can be
little doubt that the escalating phenomenon of
"spymania" is a result of the renaissance that the
former KGB apparatus has undergone since Putin came to
power in 2000.
Domestic and foreign observers
alike have lost count of the number of former KGB, FSB,
military intelligence and Foreign Intelligence Service
(GRU) officers who have been given senior positions
within the presidential administration, the government
and regional administrations. In addition, many have
become regional governors or have been elected to
national and local legislatures. And many of these
figures do not conceal their desire to revenge the
disorientation and humiliation they experienced during
the reform era of the 1990s.
The role of the
security organs, police and intelligence services in the
domestic and international affairs of President Putin's
Russia has become so pronounced that journalists have
been obliged to invent the euphemism siloviki in
order to avoid constantly enumerating the security
agencies involved. Moreover, the visible role played by
security veterans in public life must not be allowed to
obscure the fact that a much larger number of people who
owe their political careers to their covert
collaboration with the Soviet-era security organs are
very likely occupying many crucial positions in Russia
today.
Their names are unknown - and will likely
never be known - because Russia has never adopted a
lustration law that would have purged the state
apparatus of secret-police collaborators. In fact, such
a law has never been seriously discussed in Russia. The
only person who tried, unsuccessfully, to get a
lustration bill through the Duma was Democratic Russia
leader Galina Starovoitova, who was assassinated in St
Petersburg in November 1998. The men accused of carrying
out that killing are now on trial in St Petersburg,
although the case so far has revealed little about the
motivation or the organizers of the crime.
The
enhanced role of former KGB and other secret-service
veterans in Russia has given impetus to a real process
of cultural counterrevolution in Russian society, one
that is reacting against the liberal values of the 1990s
reforms and is seeking a return to Soviet traditions and
norms.
It is impossible to go into any
Russian-language bookstore anywhere in the world without
noticing the dozens of recent titles glorifying various
KGB operations. In addition, all the national television
stations in Russia are heavily running Soviet movies,
many of which are devoted to the glorious struggle of
the KGB against Western "imperialist" intelligence
agencies. Newer programs frequently glorify the exploits
of Russian special-forces troops fighting in Chechnya.
All of these phenomena are melding together into the
emergent ideology of national revanche, and it is not
surprising that in such an atmosphere a jury found
Sutyagin guilty and also ruled that he did "not deserve
leniency".
Supporters of Putin often argue that
it is natural that he, a former intelligence officer,
would rely on his colleagues just as a president with a
business background might be expected to bring
private-sector representatives into his administration.
But whatever the motive, the result is that spymania and
other attributes of the secret-service mentality will
continue to be prominent elements of Russian public
life, and domestic policy will continue to be
transformed into little more than a series of special
operations.
Reprinted with the permission
ofRadio Free Europe/Radio Liberty,
1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036.
(Copyright 2004 RFE/RL Inc.)
Apr 16, 2004
No
material from Asia Times Online may be republished in any form without written
permission.
Copyright
2003, Asia Times Online, 4305 Far East Finance Centre, 16 Harcourt Rd,
Central, Hong Kong
