Abstract
For Igor Sutyagin, the morning of October 27, 1999, must have seemed like the beginning of another busy day. An arms control specialist at the U.S.A.-Canada Institute, Sutyagin had a full schedule ahead of him. In 24 hours, he was to catch a flight to Italy where he was going to give a presentation at a research center. He also planned to meet a friend, Joshua Handler, a doctoral student at Princeton University who was doing research in Moscow, in the afternoon.
Igor Sutyagin with his daughter.
But at about 8 a.m., when he responded to a call at the front door of his apartment in the city of Obninsk, Sutyagin found several officers of Russia's Federal Security Service (fsb)–the former kgb–who had a warrant to search his home. During the search, he was taken to the fsb's Kaluga regional office for questioning. He has been held at the Kaluga detention center since then, awaiting trial on charges of treason and espionage.
Initially, the fsb told Sutyagin he was being questioned as a potential witness in an espionage case. The next day, he was informed that he was under arrest. Six days later, he was accused of treason. It would be a year before he was formally charged.
In late October of last year, the fsb issued an indictment against Sutyagin, accusing him of having passed state secrets to a British consulting firm, Alternative Futures Consultancy, which advises investors about Russian industry. Although the FSB has not revealed the nature of the information Sutyagin allegedly gave the firm, the agency says the company is a cover for British intelligence.
In an interview published in the Moscow Times last November, Su-tyagin's attorneys said that the fsb had failed to produce any evidence connecting the British firm to an intelligence agency. Nor had the agency explained how Sutyagin, a civilian without access to classified information, could have passed state secrets. According to Boris Kuznetsov, one of Sutyagin's lawyers, the fsb concluded that the British firm was an intelligence agency because of the types of questions they asked and the research methods they used. “By that logic,” Kuznetsov averred, “you could put the entire scientific community up for trial.”
“You must understand,” says Pavel Podvig, a Russian studying at Princeton University who collaborated with Sutyagin on a book about Russia's nuclear weapons, “there is almost an institutional policy in the FSB that the agency does not have to have any regard for the truth…. The Kaluga investigators looked at everything Sutyagin did in the hopes of finding something. The consulting firm was simply the weakest link.”
Sutyagin's case has raised fears that the fsb is starting to crack down on academics and scientists. In an interview with Canada's Globe and Mail last November, Podvig said, “For years, the fsb has been accusing environmentalists of revealing state secrets. Now they are widening their circle and accusing scientists and academic researchers.” The fsb's mindset, Podvig told me, “is that if someone is working on nuclear issues he must be working with secrets.”
David Holloway, a professor at Stanford University and author of the book Stalin and the Bomb, agrees. This case “is a demonstration to people to back off from critical inquiry … a warning not to explore nuclear issues too closely.”
Although the fsb apparently had little difficulty deciding to arrest Sutyagin, it seems to have had a terrible time finding a charge that would stick. For nearly a year agents scrutinized his writings, interrogated colleagues, accused various academic programs he worked with of being intelligence outfits, and investigated his dealings with foreign researchers–each time turning to a new line of inquiry.
Several days after Sutyagin's arrest, the fsb alleged that he had passed secret information about a next-generation Russian sub–by all accounts, an absurd claim. Says Podvig: “It seems that the fsb was hoping they would find something there simply because Sutyagin used to give lectures at a naval training center in Obninsk.”
The fsb also examined Sutyagin's relations with other researchers. In what appears to have been a coordinated effort, on the same day that the agency detained Sutyagin, agents in Moscow searched Podvig's office at the Center for Arms Control Research as well as Joshua Handler's apartment.
In 1998, Podvig and Sutyagin collaborated on a book titled Russian Strategic Nuclear Weapons. The fsb apparently thought it was loaded with secrets. On November 2, two days after their initial search, fsb officers returned to Podvig's office and confiscated several hundred copies of the book.
According to Naila Bolus, director of the San Francisco-based Ploughshares Fund, which helped fund the book's publication, the book contains nothing that could be considered secret. She adds that the book was cleared by the Ministry of Defense before it was published.
Joshua Handler told me that the fsb regarded him as Sutyagin's “nearest and dearest foreign-born colleague.” The two met a decade ago while Handler was visiting Moscow. As a Greenpeace activist in the early 1990s, Handler investigated the illegal dumping of nuclear waste in Russia. In the fall of 1999, he was invited by the U.S.A.-Canada Institute to do research in Moscow related to his doctoral studies.
An offer he can't refuse?
Russian President Vladimir Putin is apparently of two minds when it comes to environmentalism. While he was head of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB), the agency accused several environmentalists of espionage. The most famous case was that of former Russian naval officer Alexander Nikitin, who collaborated with Norway's Bellona Foundation on a report about the illegal dumping of radioactive waste by Russia's northern fleet. The FSB charged Nikitin with treason, claiming that the report revealed state secrets.
In July 1999, as the FSB was preparing to take the Nikitin case to trial, Putin stated: “Sadly, foreign secret services use not only diplomatic cover, they also very actively use all sorts of ecological organizations. This is why, regardless of pressure from public opinion and the media, such organizations will always be the focus of our attention.”
As president, Putin has expressed a different perspective. During a visit to Canada last December, Putin told reporters that environmental activism might be his next career move: “I have often thought what I should do when my term expires. To be honest, I have always admired people who devoted their lives to environmental problems…. I have watched with astonishment as a group of people on a little boat try to oppose a huge military or industrial ship. I must say this inspires only sympathy.”
Touched by his apparent change of heart, Bellona wrote a letter to Putin offering him a job. According to its web site (www.bellona.no), “Bellona offers Putin to join one of its rubber boats, in training or in action…. [Putin can] come to Norway to take a training ride on a rubber boat in the Oslo fjord or, if it suits him better, Bellona could also bring the boat to Murmansk where the weather at sea is more rough.”
Although Handler's work had little to do with Sutyagin's, his environmental activities had already raised red flags. (Handler's association with Alexander Nikitin and Grigory Pasko, environmentalists against whom the fsb has pursued spy cases, also must have raised suspicions.) When the fsb searched his apartment, investigators questioned him about his relations with Sutya-gin and his work with Greenpeace. They also confiscated his laptop computer and a number of reports and conference papers.
According to Handler, none of the confiscated items contained secret information. But the FSB thinks otherwise. A few days after the search, Vesti TV, the official government television station, reported that the fsb had “determined that among Sutyagin's contacts were intelligence officers from the United States and Great Britain. And recently, [Sutya-gin] met with Joshua Handler…. During a search of Handler's Moscow apartment, the fsb found materials of an intelligence nature. The fsb have no doubts that Handler is also involved in the gathering of secret information.”
Apparently, the most damning piece of evidence found in Handler's possession was information about declassified U.S. Corona satellite imagery of Russia's nuclear weapons storage system.
In a letter to the head of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Harold Shapiro, president of Princeton University, explained that the 30-year-old declassified Corona imagery was obtained from the U.S. National Archives. “Princeton faculty and students carry out research in many countries,” wrote Shapiro. “An accusation of espionage against any one of them could bring into question the legitimacy of other research projects.”
During the week following the search, fsb officers followed Handler around Moscow, questioning the people he spoke with. Finally, on November 5, 1999, on the advice of the U.S. embassy, Handler left Russia.
When Sutyagin's indictment was announced last October, Handler's name was not mentioned. But two months later, Nikolai Patrushev, head of the fsb, suggested he was still the focus of an investigation. In a December 20 interview with the daily Kom-somolskaya Pravda, Patrushev said, “In the course of our investigation [of Sutyagin], we revealed the spying activities of his contact, U.S. resident Joshua Handler, an expert in nuclear security…. During the preliminary investigation it was ascertained that Sutyagin supplied to Handler secret information on the Russian armed forces, who then transferred it to U.S. intelligence.”
Handler says: “It's like Alice in Wonderland. There are two sides to the mirror, and once you fall on their side of the mirror, anything you do will be perceived as being part of a spy conspiracy. [Vladimir] Putin and company are rolling back the clock. They have this important political objective to stigmatize people like Igor and myself so that others will fall into line.”
The fsb has also questioned Sutyagin's participation in a Canadian research project undertaken by Carleton and York Universities, the Democratic Civil-Military Relations Programme. The project, sponsored by the Canadian Ministry of Defence, focused on expanding understanding of civil-military relations in 12 former communist countries in Europe. Sutyagin was employed by the universities to interview Russian officials and academic experts on the role of civilians in the management of the armed forces and relations between the army and the public.
The fsb considered the research project to be subversive, and interrogated those Sutyagin had interviewed. According to Podvig, during the interrogations, fsb investigators insinuated that the survey was a conspiracy carried out on the orders of the Canadian military.
In a letter to the director of the U.S.A.-Canada Institute, the provost of York University, Michael Stevenson, said that he “could not believe that anyone, especially law enforcement officials, might consider such work as espionage or treason. … I would like to hope that the Sutyagin controversy reflects someone's gross error of judgment, rather than a new approach of the Russian government to the established practice of international academic cooperation.”
In its indictment of Sutyagin, the fsb conceded that it could not find any secrets in the information he had collected for the project. However, the project remains under suspicion. The Globe and Mail quoted a document filed by the fsb in court, which stated, “The information that Sutyagin was given [in the interviews] is an object of special interest to the intelligence services of foreign countries, especially nato countries.”
Sutyagin was scheduled to get his day in court in late December, but the trial was postponed until February 26 to give his defense team more time to study the charges. A day after the first scheduled hearing, a Kaluga TV station ran a news story about the case that included a video clip allegedly showing Sutyagin pleading guilty. Podvig says this was a ridiculous ploy–a plea was not entered into the record that day and the court's only action was to postpone the trial. An fsb officer had apparently entered the courtroom with a video camera and asked Sutyagin to stand up, saying he was documenting the trial.
Observers both inside and outside Russia point out that Sutyagin's is not an isolated case. The fsb is pursuing a number of espionage cases against academics, journalists, and environmentalists who work on nuclear issues and other security-related matters. And increasingly, foreign individuals and organizations working in Russia are also being harassed and scrutinized. The Ploughshares Fund's Naila Bolus told me that the Sutya-gin case is part of a “disturbing trend” in which ngos and researchers are being diverted from criticizing government policy. When she was in Russia last October, many people told her that the atmosphere was increasingly “like before Yeltsin's time.”
According to Stanford's David Hol-loway, the espionage cases brought against Sutyagin and others “help make sense of a pattern” that started nearly a decade ago. “This was a society that was extremely secret. Information was never released about environmental issues, the nuclear complex, or how many nuclear weapons the country had. Glasnost caused an opening up. You go from a situation of complete secrecy to one of great openness. But there was a lack of knowledge of what was secret. And now what you see is a reaction partly by security people, but also by other institutions trying to push the line back.”
Holloway believes Sutyagin used only open sources. But he says the case is in line “with the whole tenor of the Putin administration, which is that Russia needs a strong state and strengthened military forces. One part of that is certainly the security services–you know, our man is president and we can go back to a time when we had more power to exercise and we didn't have to be concerned about public opinion.”
At a press conference in St. Petersburg in July 1999, Yuri Shmidt, the lawyer for Alexander Nikitin, an environmentalist accused of espionage, said: “Gentleman, we no longer have the right to information about the state of the environment. Our freedom of speech is already much smaller than in the early 1990s. It will become worse. If you don't act now, tomorrow we will wake up in the Soviet Union.”