Former FSB officer and lawyer Yuri Gervis put it as follows:“What was actually done with Moiseev is called creating a recruitment opportunity. The intelligence service of South Korea could use his friendship with Cho Son Yu—an adviser at the South Korean Embassy in Russia—to recruit him. The FSB was investigating the activity of Cho Son Yu, and the service got to know of Moiseev’s acquaintance with the South Korean. Then the FSB acting reserve officer attached to the Foreign Ministry began meeting with Moiseev on a regular basis asking for information. Later, the FSB used the materials provided by Moiseev as evidence against him. This is provocation, from the juridical point of view.”
20
As it turned out, the evidence against Moiseev was unsubstantiated. In the list of supposedly secret documents transferred by Moiseev, the FSB included “An agreement on protecting migrant birds.”
21
The trial involved a total of five judges, as one judge after another failed to deliver the “right” sentence. Finally, the Supreme Court overruled the Moscow court’s sentence of twelve years behind bars—and the term was reduced to four years.
The choice of investigators on the Moiseev case was also peculiar. One turned out to be the son of the director of Lefortovo Prison, where Moiseev was being held. Another, Yuri Plotnikov, had taken part in the investigation of Edmond Pope, an American citizen who was accused of espionage. Yuri’s father, Oleg Plotnikov, had been the prosecutor in the same case.
22
Both investigators were promoted after Moiseev’s case ended. Senior investigator Vasily Petukhov, who pleaded Moiseev’s case, started as a captain and senior investigator and shortly afterward was promoted to lieutenant colonel. A year later he was to head the First Section.
Nikolai Oleshko, then head of the “spy” division in the FSB Investigative Directorate, headed the group investigating the Moiseev case.
The challenges of each spy trial made the FSB look for a different approach. The FSB found it was better to try spies under charges of economic rather than criminal law. Those steamrollered were suspected not of espionage, but of illegal export of technology and of economic crimes. Those accused of involvement were directors of well-funded research institutes with profitable international contracts.
The new approach was attempted with Oscar Kaibyshev, the director of the Institute for Metal Superplasticity Problems, who attracted FSB attention in 2005. Initially, the 65-year-old scientist was charged with disclosing state secrets. His colleagues, the academic community, journalists, and the general public supported him with a vocal campaign. Soon, Kaibyshev’s crime was reframed as the export of dual-use technology, and he was painted as a man involved in illegal commercial schemes. In August 2006 Kaibyshev was sentenced to six years probation.
23
In October 2005 the academic Igor Reshetin, general director of TsNIIMASh-Export,
a
his CFO, Sergei Tverdokhlebov, and his deputy for security, Alexander Rozhkin, were arrested by the FSB. All three were placed in Lefortovo.
FSB investigators did not accuse them of spying or of divulging state secrets. The men were charged with embezzlement and violations of export rules. Later they were accused of passing dual-use technology to China and also of smuggling.
In December 2007 the three were sentenced to five to eleven years behind bars. A few days later a letter from one of the convicted men was published on Human Rights Web site (
www.hro.org
), stating: “If our director had agreed to take part in a dialogue with the secret services, there would have been no dire consequences, while both his personal position and that of his firm would have been bolstered in the space technology market. The firm would have been protected by the FSB’s economic security service.”
24
The FSB most likely allowed for the letter’s publication in hopes that in the future, individuals in similar scenarios would take such advice to heart.
THE SOVIET REGIME used espionage fears to control the population. The KGB believed that dissident movements could not survive without Western support. In supposed efforts to prevent spy infiltration, the KGB actually traced every foreign contact of every Soviet citizen. Each Russian who went abroad in Soviet times was obliged to report all his meetings and conversations.
By contrast, the current Russian government displays no intent to exert such universal control.
In the chaotic first years after the Soviet collapse and the rise of the new Russia, the FSB occupied a modest place in society: Oligarchs employed corrupt officers, and the role of the security services in Chechnya was largely ignored. In these transitional times, the FSB looked like a bygone Soviet-era institution. They needed to find a new place in new circumstances. By leading the way in the headline-grabbing hunt for spies in the last decade, the FSB was attempting to reestablish its preeminence in society. It needed budget resources, prestige, and demonstrable success stories to compete with other security institutions and to win the respect and support of businessmen.
While the FSB claimed it was preventing the sellout of Russia and its manipulation by outsiders, the prosecutions offer no evidence that such a threat existed. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, no big fish with access to sensitive information was ever accused of spying. Instead, charges of espionage were aimed at minor figures, evidence was weak, and in some cases the proceedings were rigged. The effect of Putin’s strong-arm campaign to ferret out dissenters from within has meanwhile fueled distrust and suspicion.
4
THE THREAT WITHIN
INFILTRATING COUNTER MOVEMENTS
W
HILE THE HUNT for foreign spies operating within Russian organizations was designated one of the FSB’s top priorities under Putin’s direction, a countermovement, designed to acquire intelligence from informants planted in liberal organizations, was simultaneously put into play.
In February 2008, Andrei Soldatov received a curious phone call from Thomas Buch-Andersen, a journalist at the Danish Broadcasting Corporation in Copenhagen, who told the author that he had a man with him who claimed to have been an FSB plant in the United Civil Front organization, a liberal political group that had been formed to try to preserve democratic electoral procedures in Russia. Soldatov was skeptical, worrying that it would be hard to get information for such a story. But he asked Buch-Andersen to send clips from the interview. After listening to it, Soldatov and Borogan discussed the prospect of investigating the man with their editors at
Novaya Gazeta
, concluding that it would be worthwhile to do so.
1
At the time, the United Civil Front was one of Russia’s main opposition movements, led by world chess legend Garry Kasparov. Once the youngest world chess champion, in the 1990s Kasparov turned to politics, supporting some marginal parties and political movements. In the 2000s Kasparov tried to establish an opposition movement outside of Putin’s Kremlin. Kasparov’s movement, “The Other Russia,” adopted grassroots organizing methods; in 2006-2009 a series of marches were held in Russian cities, most of them violently suppressed by law enforcement authorities. The Kremlin was terrified the demonstrations could catalyze peaceful protests known as color revolutions, which had successfully toppled the authoritarian regimes in Serbia, Georgia, the Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan in 2000-2005. The Kremlin believed that the protests were inspired by Western institutions. Kasparov had only a few thousand followers, but he managed to successfully establish himself as an outspoken critic of the Kremlin in the Western media: constantly interviewed, he published columns in the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Financial Times
, and the
New York Times
. For the FSB, such commentary was Kasparov’s biggest sin. Kasparov was deemed to be an agent of the West who might be used one day by hostile foreign forces to overthrow the political regime in Moscow.
The FSB plant in question was Alexander Novikov, who had first appeared in Denmark in early 2008. Novikov had apparently traveled from Russia to Finland, where he applied to the Red Cross for help, before making his way to a refugee camp near Copenhagen. A week later he arrived at the office of the Danish Broadcasting Company, where he claimed he was a Russian FSB agent who wanted to cease his activities and obtain political asylum.
Soldatov thought the only way to check this out was to go to Copenhagen. Two days later he met with Novikov in a small conference room at the Danish journalist’s office in Copenhagen. Novikov, 36 years old, was a tall, imposing man with thick grey hair. When Soldatov started asking him some questions, Novikov said,“Let’s go out on the street for a smoke.”
Novikov related to Soldatov that he had been raised in Transnistria, a small breakaway province of the Republic of Moldova. This thin sliver of land has been plagued with strife since Transnistrian authorities proclaimed independence from Moldova in 1990—a move that ultimately resulted in a bloody two-year war. Today, the territory is a kind of gangster state, a crossroads for weapons shipments and smuggling. Even Russia, which supported Transnistria in its war against Moldova, refuses to recognize it.
Novikov, smoking on the street and later speaking for several hours to Soldatov in the conference room, said that he had graduated from medical school and continued his training in Russia at the Tomsk Medical Institute, a military institution. In 2002 he moved to Moscow where he worked as a doctor in several clinics. At the time of his first contact with the FSB, Novikov reported that he’d been working as a representative for Werwag Farma, a German pharmaceutical company. In exchange for a modest salary, he ran from clinic to clinic, trying to sell Werwag Farma products.
But from this point in his narrative, Novikov’s story took a strange turn. He claimed that at the beginning of 2006 he was walking down Bolshoi Kiselny Lane in the center of Moscow and spontaneously decided to drop into an FSB building to ask after someone he knew from his Transnistria days, with whom he’d lost touch and had been hoping to find for some time. Soldatov was puzzled; the FSB was decidedly not the kind of place one stopped into on a sunny day to inquire about a long-lost friend.
Once inside the building, Novikov said he had talked with an officer named Alexei Vladimirovich. The officer wrote down Novikov’s address and phone number, and later called him to suggest that they meet in order to “discuss an interesting offer.”
Novikov recalled that he had met the FSB officer in a small park in a pleasant district of Moscow. The officer brought three sheets of paper to the meeting, saying it was a contract for cooperation with the FSB. The contract had a one-year term, with an opportunity for extension. Novikov was said to be paid a flat rate of 8,000 rubles per month (this would be the equivalent of more than $320, a third of his Werwag Farma salary).
In exchange, the officer asked Novikov to infiltrate the newly formed United Civil Front (UCF) to collect information. Upon accepting the offer, Novikov was given the operational name “Mikhail.” With Alexei Vladimirovich, Novikov outlined a cover story that would help him penetrate the organization: He would tell the movement staff he was planning to help form an independent trade union for medical workers.
From the beginning of his interaction with Novikov, Soldatov had doubts about his story. There were many unanswered questions. However, it was possible to verify that Novikov had been an active member of the United Civil Front’s Moscow branch. Records, interviews, and photographs showed he had taken part in numerous demonstrations and pickets and had been detained by the police. The last such occasion was in November 2007, when he was detained for holding a lone picket near the Interior Ministry headquarters in Moscow at 38 Petrovka Street. The picket was in support of Kasparov.
Novikov reported that during his collaboration with the FSB, he was assigned a new handler. In May 2007 Alexei Vladimirovich, who had gone on duty to Chechnya, was replaced by Alexei Lvovich, a young man, only about 28 years old. There was one more man working on the scheme, whom Novikov presumed was the handler’s supervisor. He introduced himself as Andrei Ivanovich. He met Novikov only once and asked him about his activities in the Moscow branch of the UCF.
Novikov told Soldatov how he had regular meetings with his handlers, mainly on Rozhdestvensky Boulevard, near the Moscow branch office of the FSB. Novikov was regularly asked to give a written account of his activities inside the UCF, as well as receipts for the money he received from his handlers. Novikov always wrote it by hand and signed it “Mikhail.” His handlers were interested in any information about the UCF: the dates of planned protest actions, relations inside the movement, and the names of individuals close to Garry Kasparov. Novikov was instructed to open an email account where he would receive email from the UCF, which he would then forward to Alexei Lvovich. The handler also gave Novikov a cell phone number to contact.