Spy Trial of Russian Historian Outrages Peers

It sounded innocent enough: A young historian specializing in arms control issues is hired to summarize and analyze articles from the Russian press for a group of business consultants in London.

But Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB, has now charged that the consulting company was a front for an unnamed North Atlantic Treaty Organization spy agency, and the historian faces espionage charges that could land him in prison for 20 years, even though the information he provided was from public sources.

The prosecution of Igor V. Sutyagin, 36, whose trial enters its second week today in the west-central Russian city of Kaluga, has enraged colleagues at Moscow’s prestigious USA-Canada Institute here, one of Russia’s best-known think tanks, as well as other members of the academic community. They say that under the broad definition of espionage in the case, almost any journalist or political analyst could be accused of spying.

“The prosecution is trying to prove that analysts, writers and journalists may create secrets by simply publicizing conclusions they draw from open information,” said Andrei A. Piontkovsky, director of the Independent Institute for Strategic Studies here. “If the court is convinced, then all of us are in real danger.”

To the dismay of the defendant’s friends and family, the consulting business that Sutyagin worked for from February 1998 until his arrest in October 1999 has seemingly vanished, so there is no possibility to counter Russian insinuations that it was set up by the CIA.

The company, called Alternative Futures, was working out of an office center in the City of London, the British capital’s financial district. A manager at the Bankside Business Center said that the firm did not renew its contract this year and left no forwarding information.

Despite the mystery, “Igor doesn’t consider himself guilty of anything--least of all of treason,” said his attorney, Anna Stavitskaya, after Sutyagin testified in the closed courtroom last week.

“We think the prosecution indulges in wishful thinking when they try to present this company as a spy organization, and especially when they try to accuse Igor of deliberately cooperating with this firm allegedly in full knowledge that they were American spies,” Stavitskaya said.

She said there could be any number of explanations for why the company closed up shop. For example, she said, maybe it was afraid of having its name dragged into a Russian spy case.

“We think that the prosecutors are happy that this company can’t be found. It unties their hands and allowed them to indulge freely in conjectures,” she said.

The head of the FSB counterintelligence department, Col. Gen. Nikolai Volobuyev, told the Interfax news agency last week that the charges are justified by Sutyagin’s acknowledged links to Alternative Futures, which Volobuyev called “an organization set up by the intelligence service of one of the NATO countries.”

According to Volobuyev, Sutyagin was hired not only for his analytical skills “but because he has many contacts among Russian military specialists.” Sutyagin used the contacts to verify and confirm his analyses, the official asserted.

Sutyagin is described by colleagues as a first-rate analyst with many foreign contacts. At the USA-Canada Institute, he was in charge of U.S. military technology issues and occasionally published articles in his field in both Russian and foreign periodicals.

His nightmare began Oct. 27, 1999, said his wife, Irina Manannikova, 36, by telephone from her home in the town of Obninsk.

“They came in in the morning when our daughters and I were away and began the search,” she recalled. “Later, we came home and the search was in full swing--they turned the entire house upside down. They didn’t even allow me to take my daughters away . . . so that they wouldn’t see this ugly scene.

“Then they took my husband away to the FSB headquarters for three days. . . . He was not even charged with anything.”

From detention, Sutyagin wrote to his wife that he was cooperating fully with the investigators because he had done nothing wrong.

“He gave them all the information he knew, all the names and phone numbers of foreigners and foreign companies he worked with,” she said.

“Igor is a very smart and shrewd man. He is also the most patriotic person I have ever met. If there had even been a hint that something is not quite clean with some company, he would have never cooperated with it,” she added.

In the end, Sutyagin was charged with state treason, under a law that forbids “assisting a foreign state, a foreign organization or their representatives” in hostile action against the state.

Victor A. Kremenyuk, deputy director of the USA-Canada Institute, believes the case grew out of some agents’ personal ambitions.

“Obninsk is a small industrial-military center in the Kaluga region where, I am inclined to think, the FSB agents had been sitting idle for too long without any chance to give a push to their careers,” he said.

Manannikova said that she is relieved that the trial has finally begun and that she does not hesitate to talk about it with the couple’s daughters, ages 9 and 10.

“I know my husband is not a spy. I know he is innocent. All our neighbors, friends and most of his work colleagues have been supportive. If not for this, I would feel like it was 60 years ago,” she said, referring to Stalinist times.

“But in reality, not much has changed since those years in terms of the way our security organs regard our people’s acts. My husband is an honest man. He was not afraid to say what he thought was right, to speak out his thoughts in a free way. . . . And now it turns out that this is a crime.”

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Sergei L. Loiko of The Times’ Moscow Bureau contributed to this report.