The verdict, which came Monday—after an 11-day closed trial—and the harsh sentence delivered at Wednesday’s sentence hearing have served as bone-chilling reminder to Russian scientist, researchers, environmentalists and international human rights groups that the power of Russia’s Soviet-style secret services are on an upsurge with ex- KGB Colonel President Vladimir Putin—and an obsequiously pro-Putin State Duma—at the helm.

The US State Department questioned the fairness of Sutyagin's closed trial, criticizing it for its "lack of transparency and due process."

"The way it was handled has to raise questions about the conclusions of the case," deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said in a statement after a jury convicted Sutyagin on Monday.

Boris Kuznetsov, one of Sutyagin’s lawyers, quickly fingered the Russian government as having planted emissaries among the jurors, and said that they worked throughout deliberations to influence the outcome against Sutyagin.

“I have such information,” said Kuznetsov with the Russian news web site Strana.ru after the sentencing. “I got a phone call from a person who introduced himself as one of the jurors and he said that among them were two informal leaders that were pressuring the other jurors.”

Kuznetsov, however, was quick to point out that he could not be sure if these two men represented Russia’s secrect services or if they were just people who were talked into assisting the government’s case. He said he planned to thoroughly review the list of jurors on the case in the coming days for possible connections between jurors and the Russian secret services.

Sutyagin defense attorney Boris Kuznetsov, picuted here in front of the Moscow City Court, suspects jury tampering.

Strana.ru

The FSB accused Sutyagin of collecting material on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems and passing it on to US Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, officers through a British consultancy firm called Alternative Futures. The FSB claims Alternative Futures was a front operation for the CIA. Sutyagin maintained the information he gathered came exclusively from open sources and had been passed onto the British firm on the basis of a legal freelance contract.

Sutyagin, who has been in jail since his arrest in October 1999 by Russia's Feral Security Service, or FSB—the successor organization to the KGB—protested his innocence in court Wednesday.

Sutyagin was found guilty of espionage on Monday in a unanimous decision by a 12 member jury that many rights activists in Russia say was stacked with agents from the FSB agents. Sutyagins trial by jury—a right guaranteed in the Russian Constitution, but seldom practiced—was one of the first jury trials to be conducted after the Russian judiciary started experimenting with them in 2002.

"The only thing I am guilty of is that I had contacts with foreigners," he said, the RIA Novosti news agency reported.

One lawyer on his defence team, Anna Stavistkaya told reporters that Sutyagin was “in a state of shock” after hearing the sentence.

"He had hoped for more than four years that a jury would understand this case."

Sutyagin defence attorney Anna Savitskaya.

Sergei Kharitonov/Bellona

FSB colonel calls the verdict and sentence a ‘warning’
The FSB and prosecutors, who had pushed for a 17-year jail term, expressed satisfaction at the outcome.

“Of course we are pleased with the outcome,” said an FSB lieutenant colonel that asked his name not be used, in a telephone interview with Bellona Web. “We have worked on this case for a number of years, and finally proved we are right—he is a spy.”

Asked whether researchers, environmentalists and scientists working in Russia should consider this a warning, the FSB Colonel said “absolutely.”

“This should serve as warning to scientists, ecological organizations, journalists and others who often exchange information with foreigners. There has been far too much of that over the past few years and that will change,” he added. He also denied that the FSB had tampered with the jury.

But his triumphant words echo a growing sentiment that was begun two yeas ago when Putin declared during public remarks that foreign environmental organizations frequently engage in espionage work.

Defence says jurors manipulated
The defence team has accused the prosecutors of pressuring the jurors and Judge Marina Komarova of manipulating them by asking them to consider the wrong questions when evaluating Sutyagin’s alleged guilt of espionage.

Indeed, of the four questions Komarova asked jurors to consider in deciding their verdict, none contained a reference to state secrets—even though the prosecution alleged that Sutyagin sold information containing state secrets to Alternative Futures, the alleged British cover for US intelligence.

The first two questions given to the jury by Komarova asked whether Sutyagin had been recruited by a "foreign defence intelligence service" and whether he had been paid for the information he passed over to that service, according to Kuznetsov, who spoke to Bellona Web in a telephone interview from Moscow Tuesday. The third question was whether Sutyagin should be found guilty based on the answers to the first two questions, while the fourth was whether he deserved leniency. The jury was unanimous on the first three questions and split, with four for and eight against leniency—something Komarova would legally have had to act on had the jurors voted for it when sentencing Sutyagin. Wednesday’s sentence makes clear lenience was not on Komarova’s mind.

Defense to mount an appeal
Sutyagin’s lawyers say they will appeal the case to the Russian Supreme Court and, if that fails, to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasborg.

"It was an expected ruling after the jury's verdict, the court had grossly violated the due process of the trial," said Sutyagin defence lawyer Kuznetsov to reporters in Moscow outside the courtroom, Agencie France Press reported.

Sutyagin’s employer offers tepid support
USA-Canada Institute Director Sergei Rogov said in an interview Wednesday with the Russian radio station Ekho Moskvy that Sutyagin’s contact with the British firm was his undoing, and had Sutyagin approached him prior to contracting with Alternative Futures, Rogov said he would have advised Sutyagin against it. And, although Sutyagin remains on the USA-Canada Institute staff as a vote of support, Rogov’s comments fell short of a ringing endorsement of his colleague’s innocence.

“You can’t do such things,” as make contracts with foreigners, said Rogov. “Sutyagin of course, didn’t transfer any information of a secret nature because he didn’t have access to it. But he is a good analyst and could fully, gathering information from open sources, newspapers, magazines, produce analyses and prognoses for his foreign partner that could damage the interests of Russia.”

Despite several calls by Bellona Web, Rogov could not be reached for further comment.

Sutyagin’s arrest, previous trials, and judicial irregularities
While working for the Moscow-based USA and Canada Institute, Sutyagin was arrested by FSB agents in Kaluga in October 1999 and was charged with selling information on nuclear submarines to Alternative Futures. Sutyagin has said repeatedly that he did not have any reason to believe the British company was an intelligence cover.

Sutyagin’s trial initially began in the Kaluga regional court in February of 2001, two years after his arrest. The trial proceeding in fits and starts, and was delayed several times. During the hearings, several violations of procedure were evident. In December 2001, the court declared the case against Sutyagin groundless, and sent the case back for further investigation. Sutyagin, meanwhile, remained in jail.

Sutyagin's lawyers got the case transferred to the Moscow City Court last year, and the court agreed to their request for a jury trial in October. The new trial—closed because of secrecy concerns about involved documents—began in November of 2003

In February of 2004, Judge Pyotor Shtunder withdrew himself from the case without giving any reason and was replaced by Komarova. The original jury, chosen in November 2003, was also dismissed and a new one selected under Komarova, who has jailed a number of high-profie accused spies.

Human rights activists rally around Sutyagin
In January, four international rights groups protested to the Council of Europe democracy body that Sutyagin was "the target of politically-motivated treason charges" and was being denied the right to a fair trial.

One man who has been through that legal meat-grinder is investigative journalist Grigory Pasko, who, in 1997, exposed the illegal dumping of radioactive waste by the Russian navy in the Pacific Ocean to Japanese media, and received a four-year jail sentence for "espionage" and "high treason" before being released on parole last year. He is now editor of Bellona’s Russian-language “Environment and Rights” magazine.

“Fifteen years for an innocent man Sutyagin is payback for all the case they have lost, and two, the Alexander Nikitin and the Danilov case, which they lost spectacularly,” said Pasko in an email interview with Bellona Web. Bellona’s Nikitin fought a five year legal battle with Russian authorities for publishing open information about submarine accidents in a Bellona report. He was fully acquitted in January 2000.

“That Sutyagin’s sentence would be unequivocally guilty has been clear for a long time: the Soviet KGB spook system is not accustomed to exonerating a person after they have already been sitting in jail for several years,” Pasko said.

Internationally renowned Russian human rights lawyer Yury Schmidt.

Viktor Teryoshkin/Bellona

“I am very disappointed that it all came to this,” he told Bellona Web in telephone interview Wednesday. “They dragged out the case for such a long time that to count on an exoneration was impossible. especially after the exoneration of Danilov. I don’t think that the court was objective.”

Pasko added his voice to the many who insist that jury selection was manipulated by the FSB.

“I won’t believe for anything that people chosen at random by a computer unanimously found a person guilty just because the FSB said the documents composed by Sutyagin were secret,” he said. “Then eight of these 12 people didn’t find cause for leniency in the sentencing portion of the trial.”

Maria Lipman of the Moscow office of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and editor of the Russian quarterly “Pro et Contra,” was, like other human rights activists, amazed by the length of the sentence and its disproportion to the alleged crime in a phone interview with Bellona Web.

“Today’s sentence was a surprise because all previous events with accusations of espionage ended either with exoneration, or a softer sentence—and that despite the fact that the FSB was demanding the maximum sentence,” said Lipman, who is also a frequent contributor to such respected western publications as The Washington Post newspaper and “The New Yorker” magazine.

“One wants to believe that this is not a turn in state policy, but a personal agreement of the judge with certain agencies.”

Indeed, agreements between courts and security services would not represent a turn in state policy at all. It would be a reminder that Russian justice is still conducted behind closed doors where prosecutors target individuals and do everything possible to get them convicted. Even jury trails—Russia’s most hopeful step toward normalizing its legal system in many years—remain subject to the backroom agreement.

Charles Digges reported from Oslo and Rashid Alimov reported from St. Petersburg.