January 23, 2006

Russia accuses UK of spying, rights bodies worried

By Richard Balmforth

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia accused Britain on Monday of running a James Bond-style spying operation in Moscow using a receiver hidden in a fake rock to gather secret information, and said it had been caught "red-handed" funding pressure groups.

A programme aired on state television said four British diplomats used a hi-tech version of the "dead letter drop" of spy novel fame -- a dummy rock by the roadside that could receive information electronically and beam it to a hand-held computer on demand.

A TV grab from Russian television RTR Channel broadcast on Sunday, January 22, 2006, shows what it alleged was a British spy touching with his foot a transmitter in an imitation rock on a Moscow street. (REUTERS/RTR Television)

But the head of a human rights group named in the report said its underlying target might be just such non-governmental pressure group (NGOs), whose activities were curbed by a law signed this month by President Vladimir Putin.

The FSB state security service said the spies, working as diplomats at the British embassy, had been caught funding NGOs -- but did not explain why this was illegal.

"The most important thing is that we caught them red-handed while they were in contact with their agents (and established) that they were financing some non-governmental organisations," FSB chief spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko said.

The new law bans foreign funding of any NGO with "political purposes", though it does not spell out what this means. However, it would not apply to this case since the spying was alleged to have taken place before the law was approved.

Putin, himself a former KGB spy, has said the West is using NGOs as political instruments -- meaning they are being employed to foment unrest of the sort that brought down the pro-Moscow establishment in Ukraine in December 2004.

In London, the Foreign Office denied allegations of spying and said Britain was open in its support of Russian NGO projects "in the field of human rights and civil society".

RIGHTS GROUPS WORRIED

Human rights groups sensed danger ahead.

Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, which was named in the Rossiya TV programme, said:

"I consider that this is a campaign against non-governmental organisations in Russia which is being organised from above and includes the television channels ... This is a complete 'deja vu' from the Soviet Union."

In an episode that recalled the dark days of the Cold War, Rossiya TV named four British diplomats as spies, including one who it said was Moscow station head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service.

The British embassy declined comment on their whereabouts.

A former Russian spy said the programme was sure to be following a political agenda.

"When these conflicts become public it is usually because politicians need them to become public for a particular reason at a particular time, though what that reason is in this case, I simply do not know," said Valentin Velichko, who now heads the Veterans of Foreign Intelligence.

The programme showed video footage of the imitation rock lying in snow by a roadside. A man identified as one of the diplomats walked up, picked it up with some effort and made off with it.

Spy scandals were a recurring staple of British-Russian relations in the Cold War but are less frequent now, though both sides admit to intelligence operations on each other's soil.

There was no immediate explanation as to why Moscow had chosen this moment to risk upsetting relations with Britain, just as Russia starts its presidency of the Group of Eight industrialised nations.

But ties between the two powers have cooled recently over the war in Iraq, Chechnya and British courts' refusal to extradite businessmen and Chechen leaders wanted in Moscow.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last week listed the West European powers with whom Russia had particularly warm relations, but conspicuously failed to mention Britain.

(Additional reporting by Guy Faulconbridge)

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