Article 1 eurasia insight tbilisi claims russian troop movements in response to spy dispute diana Petriashvili 9/29/06

Author: By Yuri Khots

KRASNOYARSK, April 24 (Itar-Tass) -- Russian space engineer Valentin Danilov, arrested in Krasnoyarsk on spying charges, is suspected of having passed over to foreigners the information reducing by 15 years the creation time of new-generation radiation shielding for satellite constellations, Tass learnt from a spokesman for the regional FSB department on Tuesday.

According to the FSB officer, successful research pursued by Siberian scientists makes it possible to shield the communication satellites of different purposes not only from solar radiation, but from most different interferences.

Danilov took part in the research at the Krasnoyarsk State University, and at the Applied Mechanics Research and Production Centre, a leading manufacturer of communications satellites in Russia>.

A source at the Krasnoyarsk State University told Tass that a contract Danilov had signed with the Chinese side cost over 350,000 US dollars. Danilov transferred a considerable part of the sum to a front company, whereafter he cashed the money. Danilov is therefore charged not only with <espionage but fraud as well.

By Simon Saradzhyan Staff Writer

The Federal Security Service claims to have disrupted the activities of dozens of spies in Russia> last year in what officers say reflects growing Western interest in defense industry know-how.

FSB director Nikolai Patrushev told a meeting of his agency's top brass Wednesday that the activities of 65 professional foreign spies were disrupted and 30 Russian citizens were prevented from passing over secrets to foreign services in 1999. In comparison, the FSB foiled the activities of 11 professional spies all over <Russia> in 1998 and caught 19 Russians trying to sell classified information to foreign secret services.

Neither Patrushev nor other FSB officers would disclose how many of these people were arrested or deported.

One FSB officer said last year's increase showed that Western <espionage> activities have become more active. "Their activities are, of course, not as intensive as they were during the Cold War, but I can say that attempts of industrial <espionage> were on the rise last year," said the officer, who asked not to be named.

Some cases were reported. For instance, a second secretary of the U.S. Embassy, Cheri Leberknight, was detained in Moscow in November and accused of receiving information from a Defense Ministry serviceman. She was told to leave the country.

In July, the FSB said Justine Hamilton, who coordinated a student exchange program in Voronezh, had collected "secret environmental maps" for the CIA in the central Russian city. Hamilton had returned to the United States by July, but was denied an entry visa when she tried to come back to <Russia>.

In addition to exposing suspected foreign spies, the FSB was busy trying to nab Russian citizens, including environmental researchers, suspected of spying for foreign secret services.

Russian regions that have large defense companies and military facilities on their soil attracted most of the foreign secret services' attention last year, one officer at a regional FSB branch said.

Svetlana Korneva, spokeswoman for the FSB's Saratov area branch, said her colleagues detected 24 suspected professional spies visiting the Volga region last year. She said all of them were employees of foreign companies and organizations and were careful not to try "anything illegal."

The 24 were followed until they left the region, which has the Balakovskaya atomic station, a base of long-range bombers, the NIIKhIT rocket battery plant and one Yakovlev aircraft production plant on its soil. While failing to net any foreign spies last year, the Saratov FSB branch detained local resident Yury Bibikov on allegations he contacted the CIA to try to sell sensitive information on <Russia>'s relations with Iraq.

The neighboring region of Samara also has seen at least 20 suspected foreign agents in the past two years, according to the local FSB branch. The TsSKB-Progress company, which manufactures Soyuz space rockets and Soyuz-TM escape vehicles, is located in Samara.

Alexander Pikayev of the Moscow Carnegie Center, speaking Thursday in a telephone interview, said it was all but impossible to know whether Western secret services have become more active because <Russia lacks effective civilian control over its secret services.

Author: By Boris Kipkeyev

MOSCOW, December 27 (Itar-Tass) - Agents of the Federal Security Service have cut short in 2000 "the spying activities and other illegal actions" of more than thirty foreign secret agents. Most of them were expelled from <Russia>, Itar-Tass was told at the Public Relations Centre of the Federal Security Service on Wednesday.

The resident agents of the embassies of several Middle East countries have lost many of their valuable informers. Moreover, the Russian counter-intelligence has kept under surveillance about four hundred foreign secret agents in 2000. The spying and other subversive activities of eleven of them were cut short, officials of the Public Relations Centre disclosed.

New information was obtained in the outgoing year on the use of informational technologies by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States in its <espionage> and subversive work against <Russia. Its attempts to get into the local computer systems of the Federal Security Service were reduced to nought, the officials noted.

More than seven hundred phone calls from Russian citizens were received by the Federal Security Service in 2000 and several dozens of them were directly linked with its counter-intelligence work.

Author:

FSB Director Nikolai Patrushev earlier said, "the counterintelligence will ensure a tougher protection of state secrets." He did not disclose details of the operation saying only that "the cases were instituted on the information from the Maritime Territorial FSB Department."

"This fact proves our conclusions about serious activation of foreign intelligence services in search for Russian secrets," said the director.

The Maritime Territorial FSB Department said the two people charged with <espionage were in custody. The sourece refused to provide any other details.

Author: By Ana Uzelac Staff Writer

John Tobin, the American Fulbright scholar convicted of using marijuana, could face espionage> charges based on testimony by a new witness who accuses Tobin of trying to recruit him to be a U.S. spy, the Federal Security Service said Tuesday.

A former U.S. colleague of the witness, Dmitry Kuznetsov, painted him Tuesday as a liar and a thief.

Pavel Bolshunov, spokesman for the FSB branch in Voronezh, said Tuesday that the FSB was undecided about bringing <espionage> charges against Tobin, 24, but was reviewing allegations by Kuznetsov that he was questioned by Tobin three years ago while awaiting trial on embezzlement charges in Bridgeport, Connecticut.

In interviews published Tuesday by Interfax and the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper, Kuznetsov said Tobin offered him favors in exchange for cooperation with the FBI. He also told MK that Tobin interrogated him at length about his friendships with several American professors.

Kuznetsov said that he was in prison on charges of embezzling grant funds from a Connecticut university.

He could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Bridgeport Correction Center spokesman Brian Garnett said by telephone Tuesday that the prison had no record of ever holding a suspect named Dmitry Kuznetsov.

However, Sidney Weinstein and Ted Sarafian, whom Kuznetsov named in his interview with MK, recalled knowing the Russian, and Weinstein called him a crook.

Weinstein said he knew of several instances in which Kuznetsov was involved in unethical scientific research, including cases when he published articles based on fictitious data and quoted fictional scientific journals.

"[He] fell from being a promising scientist to becoming a competent crook," Weinstein said by telephone from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

He said Kuznetsov stayed at his home for a while in the late 1980s and left suddenly without returning $36,000 that he had loaned the Russian.

"I would have strong doubts about anything that Kuznetsov has to say on any subject," Weinstein said. "The man is a liar and a sociopath."

Sarafian, a scientist and professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, said he knew Kuznetsov as a scientist interested in toxicology who had attained "adequate" results in his research.

"I remember he approached me in the mid-'80s with the results of his research in mercury toxicity which were strikingly similar to mine," Sarafian said by telephone from Los Angeles. "Actually, the introduction to his work had some sentences which were identical to ones I wrote a bit earlier in one of my papers, but I hadn't given it much though at the time."

The Voronezh FSB spokesman said there were no immediate plans to file <espionage> charges against Tobin because interrogating or trying to recruit a prisoner in the United States is not a Russian offense. "But it does confirm that the FSB was on the right track in suspecting Tobin of working for the U.S. intelligence," he said. "We have not stained his reputation by accusing him of being a spy in training."

Tobin has repeatedly denied accusations that he has ties to U.S. intelligence. He was detained in Voronezh in late January while studying at a university and charged a few days later with possession and use of marijuana.

At the time, the FSB also accused him of being a spy in training, pointing to his studies at a U.S. military school and the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterrey, California.

However, no <espionage> charges were brought against Tobin.

A Voronezh court found him guilty on the marijuana charges in April and sentenced him to 36 months in prison. The sentence was later cut on appeal to one year.

Tobin's resume, however, confirms another FSB allegation that he is a trained interrogator, said Jim Maloney, a U.S. congressman from Tobin's home state of Connecticut who traveled to <Russia> with Tobin's father several weeks ago to appeal the verdict on marijuana charges.

"John Tobin was a U.S. military reservist, and Russian authorities knew that from the start," Maloney said by telephone from Washington. "Whatever he did as a member of the U.S. military on American territory is irrelevant to his stay in <Russia and his case."

John Tobin, in an e-mail to his colleagues from the Fulbright scholarship program, said the marijuana charges were a frame-up by the Voronezh FSB because he refused an offer from the Russian authorities to work for them in an unspecified role.

Kuznetsov told the Russian press that Tobin identified himself under a false name and offered to improve his prison conditions in return for his cooperation.

Kuznetsov said he agreed to review scientific material on toxicology for $100 per article but refused to cooperate further. He said he was released six months later after paying a $2,500 fine and promising to deliver 150 hours of free lectures to various U.S. universities.

Kuznetsov said he recognized Tobin on television and later traveled to Voronezh to confirm that the U.S. student was the same person who had interrogated him.

"Although he pretended that he was seeing me for the first time, I immediately recognized that he was the FBI agent who tried to force me to cooperate in prison," Kuznetsov said. "He has a special, characteristic smile."

Maloney, the U.S. congressman, said he was "very disappointed in the FSB statements" and that they were "inflammatory and counter-productive."

Tobin's lawyer Maxim Bayev dismissed the accusations as irrelevant and suggested that they were an attempt to prevent a weak case against his client from falling apart at a second appeal hearing expected within two weeks.

"The question of whether the charges against Tobin were legal and whether his sentence was well-founded is coming up for debate again, and somebody obviously would hate to see the case fall to pieces," he said on Ekho Moskvy radio.

Tobin was transferred over the weekend to the Rossosh prison in the Voronezh region to serve out the remaining seven months of his sentence. There, the FSB spokesman said, Tobin is "learning to become a carpenter."

MOSCOW, July 2 (Itar-Tass) -Russia's Federal Security Service /FSB/ has issued official charges to exiled Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, his lawyer Andrei Borovkov told Itar-Tass.

A criminal case over the oligarch's interview with The Guardian newspaper was instituted April 13, 2007, under Article 278 of the Russian Criminal Code specifying punishment for "a forcible seizure of power."

Berezovsky said in the interview, among other things, that it was necessary to use force for changing the regime in Russia>. No change is possible otherwise, he claimed.

When the reporters asked him if this was to be understood in the sense that he was preparing a revolution, Berezovsky said this was absolutely correct.

Borovkov said that the case was joined to offense proceedings under other cases related to Berezovsky's publications in foreign and Russian mass media.

"The Prosecutor General's Office has not notified yet on Berezovsky's status in the case over <espionage that was opened in connection with a statement made by businessman Andrei Lugovoi," he said.

Spy investigation against Latvian continues.

By Boris Vlasov

PSKOV, June 3 (Itar-Tass) -- During an investigation into the spy case against Latvian citizen Peteris Ausyukas new details have surfaced. The Latvian citizen was detained at the Shumilkino checkpoint on the Russo-Latvian border when he attempted to smuggle 48 topographical maps showing the disposition of Russia>'s air defence systems across the border.

The Pskov regional FSB department reported that the charts confiscated from the Latvian spy were marked " Secret", "For Personnel Only" and "General Staff." The charts map out the entire territory in the northwest of <Russia>, including the Pskov, Tver, Vologda, Yaroslavl regions, and some areas in Belarus and in the Moscow region. The charts confiscated from Ausyukas are being examined by FSB experts who are to find out where the maps came from.

Recently, the secret services of Latvia and Estonia have stepped up reconnaissance activities in <Russia> and in particular, in the border area in the Pskov region,

A similar spy incident occurred not long ago when two men, identified as Kesk and Nikonov, were detained when they attempted to illegally take out of <Russia> 40,000 secret maps Hidden in their truck. Both have been indicted on spy charges and sentenced to different terms of imprisonment.

In a separate incident last year, Estonian citizen Villy Sonn was expelled from <Russia> for <espionage. The same happened to his compatriot Pyotr Kolpachev who had collected secret information about the combat potential of the 76th Airborne Division stationed in the Pskov region.

Author: By Simon Saradzhyan Staff Writer

The Federal Security Service said Tuesday that intelligence officers at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow tried to recruit a young Russian hacker to try to break into its computer network.

While declining to provide details, an FSB officer confirmed a report by the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper Tuesday that said the 20-year-old hacker was offered $10,000 to hack into the FSB network in January, but he changed his mind after a sleepless night and turned himself in.

The U.S. Embassy declined to comment on the allegation.

The alleged recruitment attempt comes as Russia> and the United States are embroiled in a spying scandal that kicked off in February when the FBI charged veteran agent Robert Philip Hanssen with spying for <Russia>. Then in March, the United States threatened to expel 50 Russian diplomats for <espionage>. <Russia> said it would respond in kind.

Moskovsky Komsomolets reported that two officers in the U.S. Embassy's security service - Bartle Burks Gorman and John Fowler Conners - and two FBI agents - Harry Allen Dixon and Michael Pishchimuka - tried to recruit the student, who was identified only as Vers. MK published the Americans' names in Russian, and their spelling in English could not immediately be confirmed.

MK said Vers met the four Americans through retired U.S. Air Force Colonel William Smith in North America whom he met on the Internet a year and a half ago. Coincidentally, a man named William Smith also works in the U.S. Embassy's Defense Threat Reduction Office, MK reported.

Vers boasted in e-mail exchanges with Smith that he had tried to hack sites such as those belonging to the FBI and IBM. Then after the new year, Vers told Smith he needed cash and wanted to travel to the United States to make use of his hacking skills.

Smith replied that Vers should contact an official at the U.S. Embassy who would tell him what to do. Vers and embassy officials met three times between Jan. 16 and 23. The Americans then offered Vers "a secret cooperation in the interests of American secret services against the Russian Federation," MK quoted the hacker's confession to the FSB as saying.

Two days later, Vers got a message on his cellphone to hack the FSB's network within two weeks and retrieve and delete a list of unnamed files. He was also asked to recruit other hackers to attack the FSB's network, MK said.

The Americans offered $10,000 for his assistance.

Vers spent a sleepless night after getting the instructions and went the next day to the FSB headquarters to confess.

MK said the FSB released Vers after debriefing him because the law doesn't require that charges be brought against those who confess to conspiracy of <espionage before getting caught.