#5
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
27 June 2002
Mr. Putin's many faces
Russia's President shows his G8 friends a charming democrat's shell - but back home, trials and crackdowns remind Russians of the inner man
By AMY KNIGHT
Amy Knight is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University and the author of Spies without Cloaks: The KGB's Successors.

As leaders of the G8 countries begin their second full day of the summit in Kananaskis, Russian President Vladimir Putin is doing what he does best -- charming the West with his newly acquired skills of statesmanship. With nuclear proliferation and terrorism (both of which require a firm Russian response) high on the list of summit priorities, President Putin has yet another opportunity to demonstrate what a co-operative partner Russia has become to the leading industrialized nations in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

The Russian President has come a long way since his days as a KGB sleuth who spied on Westerners (and since his first year in office, when he responded to the sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea like a Soviet apparatchik and made scatological comments about Chechen nationalists).

Yet, while Mr. Putin has replaced his KGB epaulets with designer shoulder pads (and his judo costume with a Descente ski suit), he clearly has not reined in his former KGB colleagues.

Mr. Putin's sleek, newly revamped Web site, http://www.president.kremlin.ru, portraying the President as a voice of moderation and reason, stands in sharp contrast to the nearby official Web site of the Russian security services, the Federal Security Service (FSB), headed by one of Mr. Putin's closest friends, Nikolai Patrushev.

Those Russian readers who log on to http://www.fsb.ru can read all about the zealous efforts of the FSB to protect Russia from Western spies who steal state secrets, and to punish critics of the Russian government. They will also see mention of some high-profile, FSB-inspired trials that have ended in Russia this week, trials that point to a clear disconnect between the foreign and domestic agendas of the Russian government.

On Tuesday, as President Putin was heading for Canada, the Russian Supreme Court upheld the decision of a court in the city of Vladivostok that sentenced journalist and environmental whistle blower Grigory Pasko to four years in a strict, regime labour camp on charges of treason. Mr. Pasko was arrested by the FSB in 1997 for passing information to the Japanese media about the Russian navy's dumping of radioactive waste into the Sea of Japan.

Although the FSB claimed that Mr. Pasko handed over state secrets, his defenders have insisted that Mr. Pasko's information was in the public domain and that the evidence against him was forged. Mr. Pasko, who has been in and out of courts and prison cells for the past five years, is currently jailed in Vladivostok.

His case has drawn widespread criticism from Amnesty International and other human-rights organizations, which view his prosecution as an FSB attempt to suppress media freedom. But the FSB, which has a habit of pressuring the Russian judiciary, is clearly proud of Tuesday's verdict: Yesterday, its Web site added a lengthy video about the Pasko case, attempting to demonstrate Mr. Pasko's guilt.

Another verdict handed down on Tuesday was that of a Moscow court sentencing former KGB general Oleg Kalugin to 15 years of hard labour for committing treason. Mr. Kalugin, who retired from the KGB in 1990, after a much-publicized public denunciation of that agency, and moved to the United States in 1995, was sentenced in absentia.

According to Mr. Kalugin, his prosecution stems from his 1994 book, The First Chief Directorate: My 32 Years in Intelligence and Espionage Against the United States and also from his testimony last year in the trial of retired U.S. Army Colonel George Trofimoff, who was found guilty of espionage by a Florida court. The FSB claims that the former general Kalugin revealed secrets about operations and agents in the United States, where he worked for a number of years as a KGB intelligence officer.

In a third FSB-motivated case, a Moscow court on Monday convicted former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko of abuse of office and stealing explosives. (He was given a suspended sentence of three-and-a-half years.)

Mr. Litvinenko, who lives under political asylum in Britain and was, like Mr. Kalugin, tried in absentia, fled abroad in late 2000, after running afoul of the FSB when he came out with accusations that his employers had ordered him to kill business tycoon Boris Berezovsky.

More recently, Mr. Litvinenko co-authored a book accusing the FSB of complicity in the 1999 apartment bombings in Russia that killed more than 300 people. The bombings, which Russian officials blamed on Chechen rebels, aroused wide public support for a second invasion of Chechnya and helped to catapult Vladimir Putin to power in 2000.

The fact that the culprits were never found and that the FSB was subsequently caught red-handed with explosives in an apartment building in the city of Ryazan (the FSB claimed it was just a "training exercise") led Mr. Litvinenko and many other Russians, including General Kalugin, to voice suspicion about FSB involvement in the bombings.

The prosecutions of Mr. Kalugin and Mr. Litvinenko, hurried through before a law making in-absentia trials illegal comes into force on July 1, may be intended largely as a warning to potential defectors from the security and intelligence services that they would face severe reprisals if they followed in the footsteps of these men.

Given that both so openly and scathingly attacked their former employers, the verdicts against them are not that surprising. Nonetheless, their cases demonstrate that politically motivated trials, a holdover from the Soviet era, are still a part of the Russian judicial system.

The case of Mr. Pasko, the only one of the three who will actually have to serve his sentence, raises even deeper questions about Russia's evolution toward democracy. Mr. Pasko was simply doing his job as a journalist when the FSB chose to make an example of him, as it has done with numerous other scientists, environmentalists and journalists, by accusing him of passing state secrets.

The continued persecution of Mr. Pasko, despite the international outcry, is a disturbing sign of the power of the Russian security services. Whatever President Putin's views on this case (he earlier mentioned the possibility of a presidential pardon), it is clear that he has given the FSB carte blanche to pursue its own agenda, regardless of the implications for democratic reform. As President Putin shares the world spotlight with other leaders at Kananaskis, his former KGB cronies in Moscow are celebrating their judicial victories.