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Michael R. Gordon
New York Times, January 31, 1999
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia -- Shackled in handcuffs, Grigory Pasko was rushed past the small knot of fellow reporters who gathered outside the military courtroom, hoping to observe his trial.
"We will fight!" he shouted out defiantly, as two policemen hauled him away.
Then the courtroom doors slammed shut. The news media were shooed away. In a scene reminiscent of trials of dissidents in the old Soviet Union, one of the new Russia's most notorious treason trials was under way.
After reporting about the dumping of military waste at sea, the 37-year-old captain has been charged with disclosing some of the state's most sensitive secrets. Denied bail, he already has spent 14 months in a tuberculosis-infested prison. If convicted, he could stay in jail for another 20 years.
On the surface, Russia is a raucous democracy. Politics is a verbal slugfest. The constitution guarantees free expression. News media are a cacophony of clashing opinions and vested interests.
But there are still limits on free speech, especially where the military is concerned. Pasko has emerged as the vivid test of Russia's still unfinished struggle to overcome the dark legacy of official secrecy, late-night searches and whimsical persecutions.
Pasko's trial follows the arrest in St. Petersburg of Aleksandr Nikitin, a retired Navy officer who researched radioactive contamination caused by Russia's northern fleet.
But this drama in Vladivostok is being played out more than 5,000 miles from the media glare of Moscow, and features unrepentant former KGB officials and the raw politics of Russia's Far East. A closed city in Soviet times, off limits to foreigners or Soviets without special permission, Vladivostok is now an open port, a neighbor to China, Japan and the two Koreas and rife with intrigue.
"This is a test of whether there is really freedom of speech in Russia," said Aleksandr Tkachenko, head of the Russian PEN Center, which lobbies for free expression in Russia.
A career Navy officer with the outward dash of a matinee star, Pasko was working as a reporter for Boyevaya Vakhta (Battle Watch), the newspaper of Russia's Pacific Fleet, when he was arrested.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian leaders trumpeted the need for a no-holds-barred look at the nation's past. The Russian Navy was dumping weapons and nuclear waste at sea, and Pasko set out to expose it.
He filmed the environmental abuse and documented it in his newspaper. Like many cash-strapped Russian journalists, he also freelanced, providing video tapes and other material about environmental abuse to Nippon Hoso Kyokai, or NHK, Japan's largest television network.
In the months before his arrest, aptain Pasko was receiving about $300 a month from the Japanese news media, his lawyers said.
After NHK broadcast a report on the dumping of military waste, Russian authorities began to take a closer look at Pasko.
"When he began to deal with the problem of radioactive waste, he constantly felt the FSB was stepping on his heels," Pasko's wife, Galina Morozova, recalled in an interview, referring to the internal security police, one of the heirs to the KGB.
When Pasko left for a business trip to Japan in November 1997, customs officials seized some of his documents. When he returned, he was arrested at Vladivostok airport and charged with selling secret information.
That night, the FSB raided his modest apartment, confiscating his computer, fax machine and even his family's car.
"When glasnost began, there was a brief period when it seemed there could be complete freedom of speech," Ms. Morozova said, referring to the greater openness allowed in Russia in the early 1990's. "But the security organizations did not disappear and gradually the screws began to tighten again. Grigory did not notice that moment when the policy began to shift in the opposite direction." Nikolai Satskov, a senior FSB official for the Pacific Fleet, told a Vladivostok newspaper that the basic strategy was to try Pasko as an officer who gave secrets, not as a journalist who uncovered a environmental scandal.
Pasko's lawyers say the arrest may have little to do with reports on the Navy's waste dumping. Rather, they speculate, it may be an attempt to stifle the reporter after he began to inquire into the alleged theft by local officials of Japanese aid for processing radioactive waste.
The specific charges in the 10-point indictment against Pasko are classified. His guilt or innocence will be decided following the closed trial by the judge of the military court and two officers in the border guards who serve as lay judges. The degree of foreign interest, however, may influence whether Pasko can win release on bail or prevail in legal appeals.
In the similar case of Nikitin, Bellona, the Norwegian environment organization Nikitin had supplied with information, lobbied hard on his behalf. Although he has yet to be formally acquitted, he was released on bail after ten months.
Pasko's Japanese contacts, in contrast, have kept their distance.
NHK, which has a bureau in Vladivostok, did not report on the opening of his trial, said Fumina Koike, a NHK spokeswoman in Tokyo. Nor has the television network appealed for Pasko's release.
"Captain Pasko has never worked exclusively for NHK," the network said in a statement. "If Captain Pasko needs our assistance for his defense in the trial, we are willing to consider and respond frankly." Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan's largest newspapers, also has yet to report on the trial, its spokesmen said. The newspaper says it interviewed Pasko to learn about the Russian Navy and environmental issues but says it never paid him.
Pasko recently received a boost when Amnesty International designated him a "prisoner of conscience," and press-freedom organizations have come to his aid.
The Clinton administration, which did take note of the Nikitin case, has shown relatively little interest in Pasko in distant Vladivostok, his lawyers said. "We are monitoring the case, but we don't normally get involved in cases when they are before the court," said an official at the American Embassy in Moscow." With the help of his wife, Pasko did publish a letter in a local tabloid, decrying his arrest as a clumsy effort to stifle his reporting.
She said the more "serious" newspapers in Vladivostok were afraid to publish it.
Soon afterward, Pasko's visits with his wife were temporarily suspended, and he was transferred to an overcrowded cell with 30 hardened convicts.
Difficulties are also apparent in court. One of Pasko's lawyers was expelled from the courtroom after he asked a witness whether he was working with the security services.
Sitting in her kitchen, Ms. Morozova cast a glance at a photo of their honeymoon in Egypt, just six months before Pasko's arrest. Since then, she has only been able to see her husband six times.
Pasko is being kept in solitary confinement now. His wife says he suffers from high blood pressure, skin disease and a back ailment and is in constant danger of catching tuberculosis.
"I believe we will prevail in the end," she said. "But no one can convince me that this court is objective. This trial has already violated so many laws.