Convicted U.S. Spy Leaves Russia After His Release

Edmond D. Pope, the first American convicted of spying in post-Soviet Russia, flew to freedom Thursday after President Vladimir V. Putin granted a pardon on the first day possible under law, leaving Russian citizens to wonder: What was the case about anyway?

Pope, a businessman and former U.S. naval intelligence officer from State College, Pa., was released from Lefortovo prison here just eight days after receiving a 20-year sentence for buying classified information about Russia’s high-speed Shkval torpedo.

Putin, who signed the pardon shortly before leaving Wednesday for a trip to Cuba and Canada, said in the decree that Pope was being freed for the sake of “humanitarian principles” and in the interests of good U.S.-Russian relations.

Russian commentators also stressed that the release could be seen as a nod from the Kremlin to President-elect George W. Bush.

“Since the USA is so highly important for Russia, the president has decided to start the relationship with the new U.S. administration with a gesture of goodwill,” said Anatoly I. Utkin, director of the Institute of International Research, a Moscow think tank.

The case began in April when Pope, who founded a company in 1997 to market Russian marine technology, was arrested here on charges of obtaining classified documents about the Shkval, which means squall in Russian. The torpedo travels at three times the speed of any in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s arsenal.

Professor Anatoly Babkin, the head of the rocket engine department at Moscow’s Bauman State Technical University, also was arrested by the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor to the KGB. He was accused of passing state secrets to Pope for about $30,000.

Pope maintained his innocence, saying that he was only seeking unclassified technical nformation for business purposes and not on behalf of any government, that he had obtained documents showing the information was legal and that Russia in any case had started marketing Shkval abroad.

To many Russians and Americans, Pope’s two-month trial had harked back to the worst show trials of the Soviet era. The case prompted the State Department in October to warn Americans to avoid dealings with the “Russian military-industrial complex.” And when the presiding judge imposed the maximum sentence Dec. 6 after brief deliberations, it seemed that the conviction might permanently harm U.S.-Russian ties.

But almost as soon as the sentence was announced, there were signals that Pope would be freed. The presidential clemency board, in fact, was called into special session for the first time in its history to consider his case.

Because Pope was so aggressively arrested, tried and convicted, and then just as abruptly pardoned, Utkin said that the affair has left behind a measure of confusion in the Russian public.

“What is Pope: a spy or a businessman? What is America: a friend or an adversary? Russian people have been getting mixed signals about it for the past 10 years,” he said. “And the Pope case does not make this situation any clearer.”

Moscow’s Sevodnya newspaper, in a commentary after Pope’s conviction, portrayed the case mainly as the FSB’s warning to Russian citizens not to give away state secrets.

The paper noted the “ostentatious severity” of his sentence followed by the unusual haste among the authorities to get him pardoned.

The main thing is that “Russian citizens have been taught a lesson,” the paper quoted Aleksei Bogatyryov, deputy director of the USA-Canada Institute, as saying.

Pope was the first American to be convicted of espionage since U-2 spy plane pilot Francis Gary Powers was downed over Soviet territory during the Cold War. Powers, who was sentenced in 1960 to three years in prison and seven years in a labor camp, was freed in a spy swap two years later.

After being taken directly from prison to the airport, Pope was put aboard a jet chartered by the U.S. government and taken to Germany, where he is receiving a medical checkup at a U.S. military hospital. Pope suffers from a rare form of bone cancer that has been in remission.

On the flight out of Moscow, Pope was joined by his wife, Cheryl, and his congressman, Rep. John E. Peterson (R-Pa.).

Speaking to reporters Thursday from the balcony of the hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, Pope looked pale and tired.

“Great to be back in the real world,” said Pope, dressed in a pale blue hospital robe and holding an American flag. “I feel good.”

Under Russian law, Putin could not grant the pardon until Thursday, when the sentence formally began.

According to Alexander A. Zdanovich, a spokesman for the FSB, Pope was summoned to the warden’s office at 9 a.m. to hear Putin’s pardon read to him in Russian. Then Pope’s personal effects were returned to him, and he was released to a U.S. consular official.

The pardon had been handed to prison officials the night before, Zdanovich said, but Pope was not immediately informed because the plane due to take him away was not arriving until the morning.

“So Pope was allowed to sleep peacefully through the night,” he said.