Abstract
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the former KGB, is having a banner year prosecuting purported spies. The price for its success, however, is growing mobilization of activists and international human rights groups who charge that the agency's actions are reminiscent of the dark days of the Soviet police state.
In early January, the Russian Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Valentin Moiseyev, a former high-ranking diplomat who was arrested by the FSB in 1998 on charges of spying for South Korea. A year after his arrest, while the case was still pending trial, Vladimir Putin, then the head of the FSB, told reporters that the diplomat's guilt had been proven beyond a doubt.
In July 1999, a Russian lower court convicted Moiseyev of treason and sentenced him to 14 years in prison. A key piece of evidence used against the former official was a “classified” document found in the possession of a Korean diplomat whom the FSB accused of being a spy. According to Moiseyev's lawyers, the document was the text of a public speech (Moscow Times, February 14, 2001).
Although the Supreme Court overturned the verdict in July 2000 for lack of evidence, the case followed what has become a familiar pattern for Russian spy cases: the FSB protests the ruling; the defendant remains in prison while prosecutors track down new evidence; the case goes back to court, often with a new judge presiding; and the FSB wins the appeal. In January, after Russia's Supreme Court upheld Moiseyev's most recent conviction, handed down by a Moscow court in August 2001, his attorneys filed an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights.
Several human rights groups in Europe and the United States have taken up Moiseyev's cause, arguing that his is one of a series of cases in which the FSB has targeted academics and officials who associate with foreigners. A coalition of Russian and U.S. human rights groups sponsor a Web page, Prava.org, that “is dedicated to helping individuals struggling against the resurgence of KGB-style persecution in Russia…. Prava [the Russian word for “rights”] tells the stories of those like jailed ex-diplomat Valentin Moiseyev who have been denied basic rights when seeking justice.”
In February, the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights cited Moiseyev's case as an example of Russia's “spy mania.” “Unless the spy mania is cut short, Russia's business and academic contacts with foreign countries will be curtailed. We may again become the population of a closed country,” said Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the group's Moscow office (Interfax, February 15).
In March, the FSB won a partial victory in another Supreme Court appeal, this one involving the case of Igor Sutyagin, an arms control researcher at Moscow's U.S.A.-Canada Institute. The FSB arrested Sutyagin in October 1999, accusing him of selling classified military information to foreign intelligence agents (see “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” March/April 2001 Bulletin). Last December, a regional court in Kaluga ruled that the FSB had failed to present enough evidence and had “committed substantial violations of legal procedures, which deprived the defendant of his constitutional right to defend himself.” The court, however, ordered that Sutyagin remain in prison while the FSB searched for more evidence.
Grigory Pasko, Igor Sutyagin, Valentin Moiseyev, and Oleg Kalugin.
Sutyagin's attorneys appealed the decision, arguing that it was based on a judicial practice the Supreme Court had repudiated. But the panel of three Supreme Court judges that heard the appeal apparently thought otherwise. Although the judges agreed with the earlier court's ruling that the FSB had failed to present sufficient evidence, it upheld the decision to keep Sutyagin in prison.
According to a July 16 press release from the human rights division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “There is great concern that Dr. Igor Sutyagin is being prosecuted for the peaceful exercise of his freedom of expression and academic freedom.” In protesting his prosecution, the association cited several international human rights conventions, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
June saw the FSB's winning streak reach four in a row. On June 25, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction for treason of Grigory Pasko, a military journalist who reported on the navy's dumping of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan. Last December, a military court convicted Pasko of “high treason in the form of espionage” and sentenced him to four years of hard labor. According to the FSB, Pasko passed notes from a secret military meeting to the Japanese media.
Pasko was first arrested in November 1997, and in 1999 a closed military tribunal convicted him of “abuse of office” for his reporting activities, sentencing him to three years in prison. Pasko was given amnesty in July 1999, but the FSB appealed the case to the Military Collegium of the Russian Supreme Court, which ruled that all the facts in the case had not been presented. It then sent the case to a Vladivostok military tribunal for a new trial. “When the authorities decide that they are going to convict you of something, there is absolutely no way to win,” said Charles Digges of Bellona, a Norway-based environmental group, after the Supreme Court upheld Pasko's most recent conviction (Boston Globe, June 26).
In February, Amnesty International and Greenpeace International launched a joint “cyber appeal” on Pasko's behalf, which was addressed to President Vladimir Putin. The organizations called for Pasko's immediate release, arguing that his conviction “was motivated by political reprisal for his exposure in 1993 of the practice of dumping nuclear waste by the Russian Navy into the Pacific Ocean.” In July, the European Union Commission announced that it was launching an investigation into the case.
On June 26, one day after the Supreme Court ruling in the Pasko case, the FSB prevailed in yet another high-profile treason investigation, this one involving a defendant living in the United States—Oleg Kalugin, an ex-KGB spy who worked as an undercover operative in the United States for several decades beginning in the 1950s. Although Kalugin, who moved back to the United States in the mid-1990s, refused to show up for the trial, a Moscow court sentenced him in absentia to 15 years in prison for revealing secrets about U.S.-based agents in his 1994 book, The First Directorate.
“This day shows that the Soviet system is still alive in Russia,” the ex-spy told the Associated Press after the verdict was announced. •