Russian journalist held after nuclear waste exposé
By Renfrey Clarke
MOSCOW — Undeterred by the fiasco surrounding their prosecution of anti-nuclear activist Aleksandr Nikitin, Russia's security forces are holding another environmentalist on charges of treason.
Nikitin was arrested in February 1996 by the Federal Security Service (FSB — one of the successor bodies of the KGB), after helping a Norwegian environmental group compile a report on nuclear hazards in the Russian navy's Northern Fleet. Accused of "betraying the homeland through espionage", he has been free since December 1996 while the FSB tries to come up with a plausible case against him.
Supporters of Nikitin must have felt there was nothing new under the sun when Captain Grigory Pasko, a journalist on a navy newspaper in Vladivostok, was arrested by the FSB last November on suspicion of handing over state secrets to foreign organisations.
Pasko had made numerous enemies with his exposés of the dumping by Russian authorities of nuclear waste in the Sea of Japan.
Like Nikitin, Pasko faces a sentence of 12-20 years in prison, with confiscation of property. According to reports in late January, he will be held pending trial for at least two more months while the FSB prepares its case.
Since 1992, Pasko has been investigating the handling of nuclear waste from the navy's Pacific Fleet. He was severely reprimanded by naval authorities after filming a Russian tanker dumping nuclear waste in 1993. A copy of the tape caused a furore in Japan when it was broadcast by the television company NHK.
While continuing to write on nuclear waste and human rights issues, Pasko suffered from persistent security force harassment. In a letter smuggled from his cell and published in a Vladivostok newspaper on December 9, he spoke of "crude interference by several fleet officials, linked with the FSB", in his professional and personal life.
On November 13 he went to Vladivostok airport to catch a flight to Japan, where he was due to research an article on Russian sailors buried in that country. While he was going through customs, his luggage was searched and documents he had with him were seized.
In his letter from prison, Pasko stated that the documents, which all bore on radioactive waste, had been obtained through official channels and were not classified as secret at the time he received them.
Pasko was allowed to carry on with his trip. But when he returned on November 20, he was arrested at the airport. His apartment was searched, and further documents were seized — along with his computer, printer, photocopier, fax machine, camera and even the family car.
The appearance in print of Pasko's letter spurred the FSB to call a hurried press conference on December 10. Pasko, Pacific Fleet FSB head Rear-Admiral German Ugryumov declared, was guilty of "having collected, stored with the aim of transmitting and also of having attempted to transmit and of having transmitted to representatives of foreign organisations information that was a state secret".
Ugryumov denied that the charges against Pasko had anything to do with the environment. Asked what was in the seized documents, if they had not concerned nuclear waste, Ugryumov replied: "Secret information of an economic and defence character, linked to the battle-readiness of the fleet, the carrying out of particular exercises, to the nuclear complex of the Pacific Fleet and so forth".
Ugryumov acknowledged that Pasko was not alleged to have worked with any foreign security service. Under Russia's criminal code, such collaboration is not necessary in order to merit the charge of treason. Handing over secret information to any foreign organisation, whether a news agency or the International Red Cross, is enough.
For that matter, information need not be secret for its handing over in certain circumstances to be treasonable.
In effect, the criminal code gives the security forces a blank cheque. "This is how the FSB works", Aleksandr Nikitin has reportedly observed. "Any state information can be deemed a secret, and anyone can be arrested."
In his smuggled letter, Pasko suggested that the FSB was doing a rush job of reclassifying as secret the documents which had been seized from him. Another possibility is that the documents he had in his possession will be replaced at his trial by quite different ones, which have been secret all along.
For his temerity in smuggling out a letter, Pasko has reportedly been shifted to another cell. There, he shares a space of 10 square metres with 24 other men, including violent criminals, sleeping three shifts in each bunk. According to his wife, the prosecution has offered him a reduced sentence of eight years if he confesses to spying.
The Pasko case has reminded Russian journalists, who constantly amass information embarrassing to the authorities, of just how insecure their professional footing remains.
"From the point of view of a newspaper", the Vladivostok daily Yezhednevnye Novosti observed in December, "we have a very important legal precedent, indicating that journalists are defenceless before the law. Today our colleague Grigory Pasko has stepped onto this minefield. Tomorrow any of us could be in prison."
In Pasko's own view, expressed in his letter, the purpose of the attacks on him is "to stop others getting into the habit". The goal is pure intimidation, aimed at all would-be critics of the authorities.
Pasko believes that the decision to arrest him was not the result simply of a local vendetta, but that its sources lie much further up the security force's chain of command. "I have the impression", his letter remarks, "that an order has come down from above to try to rehabilitate the activity of the FSB after the foul-up with ... Nikitin".