U.S. Businessman Always Aware of His Shadows

As an American businessman hunting technology in Russia, Ed Pope spent long days in hotel conference rooms listening to Russian researchers chat happily about their work--and their hopes for lucrative deals.

Yet no matter how relaxed the exchange, there was always a chilling presence: a government security man, who neither identified himself nor spoke but took copious notes on all that transpired.

“Nobody had to be told who he was,” said Keith J. McClellan, one of Pope’s business partners.

And nobody had a clue what peril lay ahead.

Pope, a former Navy intelligence analyst who shifted to the private sector when the Cold War ended, was pardoned and released from a Moscow jail this week, only days after receiving a 20-year prison sentence for spying. The espionage conviction, the first of an American in Russia since the Cold War, strained U.S.-Russian relations and is widely seen as a signal of President Vladimir V. Putin’s new willingness to challenge America and crack down at home.

Pope has steadfastly denied being a U.S. spy, describing his work as a wholly aboveboard effort to “turn Russian swords into plowshares,” in the words of one partner. “I am not a spy,” he declared Friday during a news conference at a U.S. military base in Germany where he was undergoing medical tests before flying home. He said he planned to write a book to tell his story, “a long and complicated tale that goes back 10 years.”

Still, when Pope was thrown into prison in April for allegedly purchasing information about a technologically advanced Russian torpedo, some associates said it was not wholly unexpected. “I’m not surprised,” said Charles C. Mong, a former partner.

Does that mean Pope was a spy? Some intelligence experts and former U.S. intelligence officials say that while that’s possible, it seems doubtful.

Among their reasons: Pope’s past career would have exposed him to close Russian scrutiny and risk. And because he was no longer a U.S. government employee, he had no diplomatic immunity.

Even so, some speculate that the Russian government might have been right about one thing: With or without Pope’s knowing assistance, the U.S. government would probably have tried to get its hands on any top-priority information he acquired.

Pope, 54, who lives in State College, Pa., was unusually qualified to know about Russian military technology.

Though dozens of companies have sent officials, or “technology scouts,” to the former Soviet Union since the end of the Cold War, Pope was there from the beginning of the new era--in fact, before it.

Pope Analyzed Soviet Military While in Navy

As a naval attache in Stockholm in the 1980s, he analyzed information on the Soviet military. In 1991, two years after the Berlin Wall fell, he headed a Navy program to begin collaborative efforts among researchers in the two countries.

In 1994, when he got out of the Navy, he went to work for a similar collaborative program at a defense-oriented Pennsylvania State University research unit, the Applied Research Laboratory. The lab has, among other things, a well-known facility for testing torpedoes.

Then, in 1997, Pope opened two small businesses to try to make money off the early-stage, cutting-edge technologies he was prospecting in Russia. The Russian researchers were more than eager to collaborate.

When Pope traveled to Russia, he was “bombarded” with offers from “hundreds of people,” Mong said. “They literally lined up outside his hotel door” to talk about projects in such areas as heavy maritime equipment, advanced plastic coatings, welding equipment and water filters.

Pope tried to stay out of trouble with the authorities by declaring at all his meetings that he was interested only in pursuing unclassified material. He put disclaimers in company papers and routinely mentioned his desire to stay away from secret materials, associates say.

Before Pope and his associates made a trip or tried to organize meetings with researchers, they would “talk about making sure the FSB [Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB] would know exactly what we were doing,” McClellan said.

Yet they felt the eyes of the state on them at all times, even before the FSB began to reassert its authority under Putin’s government.

They came to believe that phones were tapped and their e-mail read. The authorities clearly always knew where they were, since they were required to surrender their passports to police as they moved from place to place, associates say.

McClellan, Pope’s partner in a venture called TechSource Marine Technologies, said he was reluctant to send encrypted messages and attachments via e-mail, even though that is standard practice for most businesses with proprietary information, for fear of arousing official suspicions.

Authorities Watched Movements Closely

Even today, back home in State College, McClellan says he believes Russian intelligence is following his activities from the other side of the world. “They may be listening to this phone call right now,” he said in an interview.

Pope and his associates knew the authorities would watch especially closely any of their projects involving technology that could be used for cutting-edge military purposes.

One of these was the collaborative research Pope was trying to foster on the technology used in the Shkval, or Squall, torpedo. The Squall is said to travel at speeds of more than 200 mph--more than three times as fast as Western rivals--using a process that boosts its movement through the water by enveloping the torpedo in a bubble of gas.

“It appears they’re still ahead of everybody with this system,” said Paul Beaver, a leading expert on the arms trade at Jane’s Information Group in London.

While the Russians have marketed the torpedo actively at arms shows and have sold versions of it to other countries, they have kept some aspects of the engineering process secret, defense experts say.

Private defense experts believe the U.S. government is highly interested in obtaining more information about the Squall’s engineering.

Commercial companies are also interested. Shipping, for example, could be revolutionized by a technology that multiplied the speed and efficiency of cargo vessels.

“If you could double or triple these speeds, it would be worth a lot,” said Norman Polmar, an analyst in Washington who specializes in naval weaponry and intelligence.

Pope’s apparent misstep came when he paid a professor at Bauman State Technical University in Moscow $28,000 for a report related to the technology used in the torpedo. Pope insisted that the report was unclassified material related to a continuing collaborative project set up by Penn State. But the Russian government said the material included secrets about the torpedo that had been held back so Russia would keep ultimate control of the weapon.

Pope’s friends and supporters say his jailing was a crude setup intended to make an example of the American and signal that Russia is serious about protecting its technology. They contend that there’s no way he could have been spying for the U.S. government.

Though he was trained as an intelligence analyst, that’s far different from being an operative, said McClellan, who declared that Pope would have been “foolhardy” to try engaging in espionage on the ground.

Some friends say Pope’s behavior shows he doesn’t have the right personality type to be a spy, particularly the instinctive ability to stay cool and inconspicuous.

Though he was trying to stay clear of the police, Pope liked to record everything that went on during his business trips and had a habit of carrying a still camera and a video camera wherever he went. He was constantly snapping pictures of government buildings, Russian researchers and products in a way that was sure to alarm the skittish FSB, friends say.

When he was arrested, he had a video camera with him. And he displayed none of the characteristic smoothness of a cinematic spy.

On the night of his arrest, Moscow TV viewers saw footage of a man who wasn’t waiting calmly for his lawyer but instead was waving documents at police and trying, clumsily, to talk them out of arresting him.

“He thought this was all a big misunderstanding and if he showed them what he had . . . they would let him go,” McClellan said.

A native of Grants Pass, Ore., Pope lives in a one-story home north of State College with his wife and his college-age son and daughter-in-law and their baby. He has tried to develop a business, on the side, of marketing Russian nesting dolls, repainted to depict American themes.

He’s a chatty neighbor, the kind who will come over to help you move a heavy piece of furniture, friends say.

Of course, all of that could be simply cover.

Intelligence and defense experts say U.S. spy agencies could be using someone like Pope as a regular agent or as a freelancer selling information piecemeal.

But in interviews, several said they considered that relatively unlikely. Because of the scrutiny that Pope would doubtless be under, and the substantial risk that he might be caught and the U.S. government embarrassed, “they’d probably prefer to stay at arm’s length,” said one former intelligence official who asked to remain unidentified.

And some analysts pointed out that the U.S. government probably could obtain the information in other ways involving less risk or bad publicity.

Like many foreign services, the CIA has for decades had a program in which it tries to debrief Americans who have had access to information from foreigners, said Melvin Goodman, a former CIA Soviet analyst who is now a professor of international security at the National War College in Washington.

With his intelligence background and military service, Pope would certainly be knowledgeable, and probably would want to help any such inquiry for patriotic reasons. “He’d be a natural,” said Goodman, who added that he had no direct knowledge of the Pope case.

The CIA and the Pentagon also could try to acquire the information by buying it from the American businesses or universities that acquired it from Pope.

“Could the U.S. government obtain it? Quite possibly,” said analyst Polmar.

“He’d need never know.”