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Transitions Online
www.tol.cz
25 July 2002
Every Scientist Is a Potential Spy
Russia’s secret services have uncovered another “spy.” Bravo for them--but
not for the truth, or Russia’s beleaguered scientific community.
by Yuri Govorushko
Yuri Govorushko is TOL’s correspondent in the Russian Far East.
VLADIVOSTOK, Russia--Scientists have not had it easy in Russia since 1991. To their numerous existential problems, Russian researchers currently have another: the fear of working with foreign colleagues and on international projects. Russian scientists cannot be sure that one day, after years of dedicated and successful work, they will not be arrested and stand trial for espionage--as is happening now to Vladimir Shchurov, a scientist based in Vladivostok.
Shchurov, the head of the Laboratory of Acoustic Ocean Noises in the Pacific Oceanographic Institute (POI) in Vladivostok, is accused of smuggling, illegally exporting dual-purpose technology, and divulging state secrets to China. The case, which began on 3 July, is closed to journalists, as previous cases have also been.
The story begins in 1998, when the POI partnered with Kharbin Engineering University in China on a sound-detection project. The Russians were to provide the scientists and equipment, while China provided an exploration ship and also paid $200,000 to the Russian institute. For Russian science, in its impoverished state, the agreement was cause for great celebration. It was a prestigious project, and Shchurov was its head.
But the next year, on 31 August 1999, Shchurov was arrested on the Russian-Chinese border carrying acoustic equipment. The day after, agents of the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor to the KGB, searched his lab. Since that day, Shchurov’s life has been turned upside down. His thriving laboratory--the only one of its kind in Russia--has all but withered away, the agreement with China was cancelled (with $100,000 still unpaid), and Shchurov himself has endured months of interrogation. Worst of all, his son has died--a suicide, the police files say. But his father believes it was murder, given that some diskettes with valuable scientific information that his son was carrying have disappeared.
The FSB claims Shchurov senior, who is now 62, was carrying start-of-the-art equipment capable of detecting submarines and therefore capable of being used against Russia. What’s more, the FSB asserts that Shchurov had secret scientific documentation and photos that he was planning to hand over to the Chinese.
Any layman might pose to the FSB at least two seemingly banal questions. First, Russia sells China, a strategic partner, its latest military weaponry, including submarines, missiles, and other technology that is the fruit of Russian scientists’ labor. Why, then, are scientists guilty for engaging in scientific, non-military projects with China? Second, why would Shchurov carry allegedly secret information in person when the Internet offers a safer, swifter option?
But the case gets odder still. As Shchurov told TOL:
“Our contract was approved by two expert commissions and authorized by the FSB itself. We couldn’t imagine anything like this: At first they allowed us to work, and later they claimed that our work was illegal! We have been using this equipment in projects with the Chinese since 1989--so it can’t be confidential, least of all to China! This supposedly secret device was created to gauge sounds in the ocean. The practical purpose of our experiments was to understand the sounds made by the ocean in order to identify the ocean’s behavior. Thanks to this equipment we can gauge the strength and direction of waves, underwater currents, and we can determine what is happening at any point in the ocean without going to sea. Such equipment could probably also be used to locate submarines--but to do so, it would need to be turned into a real tool of war, and if the Chinese wanted to do that, they could have done so years ago as all the necessary information has already been published in foreign scientific journals.”
The FSB may simply be seriously mistaken in its accusations against Shchurov. Or is it deliberate, or “fabricated” as Shchurov asserts? There have been many “spy” scandals involving scientists, ecologists, and journalists in Russia. Another POI employee, ecologist Vladimir Soifer, was in 2000 tried for reports for the Swiss organization Green Cross on the ecological situation in Chazhma Bay, a bay in the southern Primorye region where an accident on a nuclear submarine in 1985 resulted in a major radiation leak. He was ultimately found guilty but amnestied on the grounds of old age (as Shchurov could theoretically be on two of the three counts against him).
Another example from Vladivostok is the much-publicized case against the military journalist Grigori Pasko, sent to prison for spying for Japan after reporting on the dumping of nuclear waste by the Russian navy. And in the case perhaps closest to Shchurov’s, Valentin Danilov, a university lecturer in space technology in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, stands accused of treason for passing state secrets to China. His university, too, was involved in a project with China. Once again, the information alleged to be secret had, say colleagues, been in the public domain for years.
The cases beg the questions: Does Russia have too many state secrets? Does it have too many secret services? Or both?
The most probable explanation for the Shchurov case is the FSB’s desire to broadcast its importance loudly and clearly to Russians. But other cases have already sent out that message. A second possibility is that Shchurov is the victim of rivalry within the scientific community. A third version suggests Russian-Chinese relations have taken a turn for the worse. Why that might be and what might follow are questions that only the Kremlin can answer.
Whatever the reason, the key question Russian scientists are asking themselves is: Will the spy-hunt continue?
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