by Anna Dolgov
Associated Press Writer
December 26, 2000
Original
KALUGA, Russia –– The trial of a Russian researcher accused of using scholarly work as a cover for spying for the United States opened Tuesday, the latest high-profile espionage case to be tried in Russia over the past few months.
Igor Sutyagin, a staff member of the respected USA and Canada Institute in Moscow, was arrested in October 1999 and charged a year later with espionage. He denies any wrongdoing, and Western colleagues have said the charges are absurd. He faces 20 years in prison if convicted.
The closed-door trial in a rundown regional court building in Kaluga, a small town southeast of Moscow, near Sutyagin's hometown, came just three weeks after American businessman Edmond Pope was convicted on espionage charges and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Pope was pardoned by President Vladimir Putin on Dec. 14 and has returned to the United States.
Sutyagin, 35, spent 13 months in jail awaiting trial. He received the first details of the charges against him only in an indictment filed on Dec. 15, according to his lawyer, Vladimir Vasiltsov.
In the document, prosecutors accused Sutyagin of working as a spy for the United States and using his status as a scholar to gain access to state secrets from closed military bases. It said Sutyagin had been recruited by U.S. intelligence agents in England during a scientific conference in 1998. The evidence is secret.
Vasiltsov said his client worked only with published sources and had not broken any Russian laws.
At Vasiltsov's request, judges on Tuesday agreed to adjourn the court until Jan. 9 so that Sutyagin could carefully review the charges. The court also granted a defense request to allow a second lawyer into the closed proceedings when the trial resumes, Vasiltsov said.
Sutyagin had worked on several projects before his arrest, including a part-time job studying Russian military factories for potential foreign investors. He also contributed to a book about the Russian military written by researchers at the USA and Canada Institute.
Vasiltsov said his client is being punished for his analysis of information gathered from open sources.
"You can read all you want, but don't you dare compare and analyze this information, because that can produce a state secret," he said, summing up the charges against Sutyagin.
Agents of the Federal Security Service, the main successor agency of the KGB, arrested Sutyagin in his home in the town of Obninsk on Oct. 27, 1999.
That same day, Russian agents searched the Moscow apartment of Princeton University graduate student Josh Handler, who had worked in the same room with Sutyagin at the USA and Canada Institute while compiling information for a thesis.
Agents confiscated Handler's laptop computer and notebooks. Handler said his work in no way concerned state secrets, and he left Russia soon after the search.
In another spy case heard by Russian courts this fall, prosecutors have accused a Russian diplomat of selling state secrets to South Korea's government. Lawyers for another Russian diplomat have appealed a spying conviction on the grounds that their client was mentally unstable and was in contact with British agents only because he was writing a spy novel.
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