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Russia: Journalist Questioned by FSB Over Espionage Article

Andrey Soldatov report: "How the FSB and British Intelligence Are Similar"

On Monday I had the dubious pleasure of being for over four hours in the company of Pavel Plotnikov, investigator of the 1st ("Espionage") Department of the FSB Office of Investigation, in the office s building in Lefortovo.

The senior lieutenant of justice explained that I had been called in for questioning as a witness in the criminal proceedings against Sergey Tretyakov--the colonel of the SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) that had defected to the United States in 2000. A book on Tretyakov came out this January, and my interview with Peter Earley, the author of the book, and with Tretyakov himself was published in February.

Of course, it is hard to allay the suspicion that the questioning was not the response of the FSB Office of Investigation to the article "Money out of Spies," published in April, on the system of the organization of espionage processes of the FSB. Particularly when it was learned that Pavel Plotnikov, who had summoned me, is the younger brother of Yuriy Plotnikov, investigator at the start of 2000 of that same 1st Department that handled the Igor Sutyagin case and the son of Prosecuting Attorney Oleg Plotnikov, who presented the same case. They were both mentioned in the "Money out of Spies" article.

It was this chain of accidental coincidences, as a matter of fact, that seemed to me perfectly customary, adding nothing to the portrait of the Federal Security Service. What was surprising, even astonishing, was the logic of the investigation of the defector Tretyakov. I cannot paraphrase the essence of the interrogation since I am bound by a written undertaking on nondisclosure but Tretyakov was, apparently, someone that was involved in criminal proceedings charged with high treason only now, in 2008. By no means in October 2000, when the Foreign Intelligence Service colonel, doubling as an employee of the RF UN mission, as a complete surprise, disappeared from his home in New York together with his wife, daughter, SVR testimonials, and his beloved cat. And there were right from the outset no doubts that he had gone to the embraces of American intelligence, had not been abducted by mysterious strangers: the SVR claimed that Tretyakov had written a note to his former colleagues.

But in accordance with FSB logic, the formal elements of a crime in respect to the defector Tretyakov have appeared only now--following the publication of Peter Earley s book, in which there are enough shocking revelations and charges leveled at the SVR and other uniformed agencies.

It so happened that just a week ago I was at the home in Oxfordshire of my friend, the British journalist Nick Fielding--the journalist that had in the 1990s first sparked the row over David Shayler, the rebel officer of the British MI5 counterintelligence, and then involving MI6 counterintelligence officer Richard Tomlinson. I was reading, out of curiosity, the official charge against Fielding drawn up in 2001 in the interests of MI6. Judging by the text, MI6 was sure at that time that Tomlinson had been in contact with Russian intelligence. But MI6 did not consider that this contact was a crime, the crime was Tomlinson s wish to publish a book, to which he had allegedly been egged on by Nick Fielding.

The arguments were these: what Tomlinson told the Russians was not so terrible because the Russians would hardly tell this to anyone else. But if this same information were published in the open press, this secret information could be used by the intelligence services of third countries or even terrorists.