RUSSIA'S SPY TRIALS
Washington Post, March 14, 2001-03-21

IF the government of Vladimir Putin is to be believed, Russia is suffering from an epi-demic of treasonous spying by its citizens. Two closed espionage trials, of a veteran diplo-mat and an academic researcher, are underway; charges against at least a half-dozen others are pending. That, says the Federal Security Service, or FSB-successor agency to the Soviet KGB-is just the tip of the iceberg:

Its annual report said it had tracked 350 Russians working for foreign intelligence agen-cies.

Many Russians are alarmed by this news, but it's not because of the presumed loss of state secrets. What is really scary about Mr. Putin's espionage campaign is that the people on trial are distinguished mainstream academics, researchers, journalists and diplomats- and the charges against them are transpar-ently trumped up. The cases being brought in the closed courtrooms are so lacking in evi-dence and so far-fetched in their suppositions that at least three of them have been thrown out by Russian appeals courts. But it the has not discouraged the FSB, which Mr. Putin, a ca-reer agent, took charge of in 1998 before as-cending to the presidency. In each instance, the agency has responded to the verdict by opening a new case against its target.

Take the example of Valentin Moiseyev, a ca-reer Russian diplomat charged with spying for South Korea, who is currently on trial in Mos-cow-for the third time. Mr. Moiseyev has been imprisoned since July 1998 when he was arrested by the FSB and accused of passing se-cret documents to a South Korean diplomat The secret document offered in evidence turned out to be a copy of a speech Mr. Moiseyev, an expert on Korea, had delivered pub-licly. But no matter: He was convicted in De-cember 1999, after a closed trial that began several months after Mr. Putin had publicly declared that the case "was proven be-yond a doubt".

Last July the Russian Supreme Court over-turned the conviction because of a lack of evi-dence. A second trial began in October, but at its conclusion two months later the judge withdrew without issuing a verdict-perhaps because she did not wish to contradict Mr. Putin's judgment. And so a third trial is now un-derway. The FSB has no more evidence now than before that Mr. Moiseyev is guilty. But according to his attorneys, the agency has a new tactic: It is threatening to bring charges against Mr. Moiseyev's daughter, who is a stu-dent in South Korea.

The other trial now underway is of Igor Su-tyagin, a 36-year-old researcher at the presti-gious Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada. Mr. Sutyagin was arrested in October 1999 and has been jailed ever since. The FSB reportedly has charged during his closed trial this month that reports that Mr. Sutyagin provided as a consultant to foreign business groups amounted to espionage. But Mr. Sutyagin and numerous colleagues have testified that he had no access to secret in-formation but rather compiled his reports from public sources.

The numbers and brazenness of the spy case have been mounting for several years. One of the first to be charged was a journalist in the port city of Vladivostok Grigory Pasko, who was arrested in 1997. Later, a dis-tinguished scientist, Vladimir Soifer, was also charged with spying-one of three academics at the Pacific Oceanographic Institute in Vladivostok to be arrested in the past four years. The crime of both Mr. Pasko and Mr. Soifer was to publish details about radioactive con-tamination of the Bay of Chazma and Sea of Ja-pan by the Russian military. The charges against Mr. Pasko were thrown out after a long legal battle-but the FSB recently renewed them. In Mr. Soifer's case, the agency declared him guilty and granted him a pardon without bothering to have a trial. When Mr. Soifer had the pardon nullified by a court, the agency-of course-opened a new case.

The weakness of all these cases appears not to trouble the ESB or Mr. Putin. In fact, the le-gal stretch is central to the political message. "If Sutyagin is guilty of compromising state se-crets," says the veteran Russian human rights activist Sergei Grigoryants, "then any of his colleagues could also be accused, - or any oth-er independent academic who criticizes the government or has contact with foreigners." The signal of Russia's spy trials is that once again the Kremlin leadership is inclining to-wards rule by means of secret police, rather than by parliament, elections or law. Mr. Putin no doubt hopes that the prosecutions of Mr. Moiseyev and Mr. Sutyagin will send that no-tice to the journalists and intellectuals who might oppose him. If not, the FSB has those 350 additional spies already identified.

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