Russian Spy Suspects Plead Guilty as Part of a Swap

Russian Spy Suspects Plead Guilty as Part of a Swap
By BENJAMIN WEISER, COLIN MOYNIHAN and ELLEN BARRY
Copyright by The Associated Press
Published: July 8, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/09/world/europe/09russia.html?hp


Ten men and women suspected of being Russian secret agents pleaded guilty before a judge in Manhattan on Thursday, the latest step in a prisoner exchange between the United States and Russia.

The defendants — after each saying, “I plead guilty, your honor” — were sentenced to time served and were expected to be quickly removed from the country.

The pleas — to a single charge of conspiring to act as an unregistered foreign agent — brought to an abrupt end the prosecution of the 10 defendants, who were accused of being part of a Russian espionage ring and whose members had lived for years in the United States under false identities and sought to penetrate American policy making and political circles.

In accepting their pleas, Judge Kimba M. Wood of United States District Court described a separate agreement between the United States and the Russian Federation in which the Russian government agreed, among other things, “to release four individuals who are incarcerated in Russia for alleged contact with Western intelligence agencies.”

The 10 defendants agreed never to return to the United States without permission from the attorney general, and to turn over any proceeds generated from the publication of information about their tenure as Russian spies. Several of the suspects also agreed to forfeit assets, including real property, to the United States.

As the defendants stood before Judge Wood, each said he had had enough time to discuss the charges with lawyers, was satisfied with his legal representation and had discussed the implications of pleading guilty in the highly unusual case.

The defendants also revealed their true names; all but three — Mikhail Semenko, Vicky Pelaez and Anna Chapman — had assumed false identities while in the United States.

“I’ll now ask you each: Have you entered in a plea agreement with the United States government?” Judge Wood said.

The defendants answered in the affirmative, and indicated that no one had forced them into accepting the plea deal.

At the request of Assistant United States Attorney Michael Farbiarz, the judge asked the defense lawyers if their clients were given any promises by Russia in exchange for their guilty pleas.

Although most of the lawyers said they knew of no such promises, the lawyer for Ms. Pelaez, a columnist for El Diario La Prensa, said she was offered enticements to leave the United States.

The lawyer, John Rodriguez, said Ms. Pelaez was told she could go to Peru or anywhere else, was promised free housing in the Russian Federation, and a monthly stipend of $2,000 for life and visas to her two children. In addition, all expenses would be paid for her trip.

Ms. Pelaez was the only one of the 11 suspects indicted who was not formally trained as a spy. She had indicated through her lawyer last week that she had no desire to go to Russia as part of a swap, and hoped to be released on bond while fighting the charges against her.

Then Judge Wood had each defendant admit to conspiracy to act as an unregistered foreign agent, which had a five-year maximum term, giving the judge the flexibility she needed to impose sentences of time served.

They did not have to plead guilty to the more serious charge of conspiring to launder money, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

Among those who admitted to the crimes was Ms. Chapman, who ran her own real estate firm and who had attained a degree of notoriety since her arrest as tabloid newspapers worldwide chronicled her romantic history and reprinted photographs of her in skimpy attire.

The defendants also included several married couples with children. One couple from Boston known as Edward Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley had wanted a quick resolution of the case if that was the best way to help their children, their lawyer said this week.

The guilty pleas come just one day after the United States attorney’s office in Manhattan unsealed an indictment against the defendants, and less than two weeks after the takedown of the espionage ring was first announced.

The pleas came at a proceeding in which the 10 defendants were supposed to be arraigned on the new indictment. (An 11th defendant remains at large).

Meanwhile, reports abounded that an imprisoned Russian scientist, Igor V. Sutyagin, had left Russia in anticipation of a cold war-style exchange, but Russian and American officials would not confirm that, and his relatives said they had no idea where he was.

Journalists in Vienna told Mr. Sutyagin’s family they had spotted Mr. Sutyagin disembarking a plane there, and that he was met by a British officer. But hours later, his parents said they had still not heard from him and did not consider the report reliable.

“Here’s the one thing I can say with complete certainty: At the moment, I have no idea where my son is,” said Svetlana Y. Sutyagina, the scientist’s mother, who rushed home from work in the middle of the day as reports of the swap proliferated.

“There is no official information,” said her husband, Vyacheslav. “We are waiting for a call from him, but I don’t know who may give him a phone, or the opportunity to give us a call.”

The intrigue followed reports from Washington on Wednesday that just days after the F.B.I.’s sensational dismantling of the Russian spy ring, the American and Russian authorities were negotiating an exchange for prisoners held in Russia, including Igor Sutyagin.

Family members who met with Mr. Sutyagin this week in Moscow said he had been told he would be transported on Thursday through Vienna to Britain, where he would be freed. The scientist’s lawyer, Anna Stavitskaya, said that Mr. Sutyagin had verbally agreed to an exchange during a meeting with Russian officials who he believed were from Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, or S.V.R., and that Americans had also been at the meeting.

“Probably he will be free today, this is the most important thing,” said Ms. Stavitskaya, who said she had heard nothing from Russian officials.

Ms. Stavitskaya said Mr. Sutyagin had consistently denied spying for the United States, for which he was sentenced to a 14-year term, but this week he signed a document admitting guilt.

“If he is free, the United States could be thanked for one thing, for saving a person,” she said. “I am thankful to the United States, if it was the United States that included him on the list. If at last he is freed — not in the way we wanted, because we wanted him to restore his good name, but it is difficult to do it, given our judicial system — at least he will be freed in this way,” she said. “If he leaves today, it will happen quietly.”

A spokesman for Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service would not comment on the case on Thursday. American officials in Washington confirmed that talks had taken place on Wednesday, but made little further comment.

“I feel our discussions will probably be resolved by tomorrow one way or another,” said Robert M. Baum, a lawyer for one of the Russian suspects being held in the United States. Another defense lawyer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said it was possible that many of the 10 defendants, or all of them, would plead guilty in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, when they are to appear for arraignment. (An 11th defendant fled after being released on bail in Cyprus.)

A senior American diplomat, William J. Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, met Wednesday with the Russian ambassador to the United States, Sergei I. Kislyak, but State Department officials would say only that the spy case was discussed.

It was not clear who, other than Mr. Sutyagin, might be considered for a potential prisoner swap. Ernst Chyorny, executive secretary of the Public Committee in Defense of Scientists in Moscow, said Mr. Sutyagin had been shown a list of names but could only recall one: Sergei Skripal, a colonel in Russian military intelligence who was sentenced in 2006 to 13 years for spying for Britain.

Citing Russian intelligence sources, the newspaper Kommersant identified two additional candidates for an exchange: Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, a former agent with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service who has served 7 years of an 18-year sentence for espionage; and Aleksandr Sypachev, who was sentenced to eight years in 2002 for spying for the C.I.A.

Mr. Chyorny said he spent Thursday morning calling to see if the group includes other scientists he represents, like the physicist Valentin Danilov, who was sentenced to 14 years for transferring secrets to China, and the space scholar Igor Reshetin, who is serving 11 1/2 years on similar charges. But he said he had not been able to confirm any other names.

“No one knows anything, and no one can say anything,” Mr. Chyorny said.

An exchange would have some advantages for the Obama administration, avoiding costly trials that could be an irritant for months or years in American-Russian relations. But the White House might be reluctant to give up the spy suspects, who were the targets of a decade-long F.B.I. investigation, without getting prisoners that the United States valued in return.

The exchange could also fuel accusations that the administration was being soft on Russia. Conservatives, including Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and a possible Republican presidential candidate, have urged the Senate to reject the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty agreed to by President Obama and President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia.

An exchange could prove awkward for both sides in other ways. Mr. Sutyagin’s innocence has been championed by human rights activists, for instance, and his family said he would prefer to remain in Russia. And John M. Rodriguez, a lawyer for one of the federal court defendants, Vicky Peláez, a veteran columnist for a Spanish-language newspaper in New York, said he believed that she would not want to move to Russia.

But a chance to escape prison appeared to be a powerful motivator in both countries. Mr. Sutyagin agreed to sign a confession, his family said, after being told it was necessary to be part of the exchange. And a lawyer for one of the defendants who had lived in Boston, known as Donald Heathfield, said his client’s greatest concern was for his two sons. The man’s wife, Tracey Lee Ann Foley, was also indicted as a member of the ring.

Mr. Heathfield’s lawyer, Peter B. Krupp, said the children had been “the No. 1 priority and concern for my client and his wife since this whole ordeal started.”

He added, “If this case can be advanced or resolved more quickly and it helps them help their kids, they’re interested.”

The reports of a pending exchange, like the spy ring itself, seemed to have the accouterments of cold war espionage without the high stakes for national security. The Russian suspects were described by American officials as using high-tech methods but acquiring no real secrets. A swap — in Vienna, a favorite rendezvous for 20th-century spies — would serve as a colorful final chapter for the espionage-novel plot.

No American accused of spying is known to be in Russian custody. But Mr. Sutyagin was one of a number of Russian scientists imprisoned after being accused of revealing secrets to the West.

Jeffrey H. Smith, a former C.I.A. general counsel who negotiated a number of spy trades as a State Department lawyer in the 1970s and ’80s, said that during the cold war the United States almost never brokered swaps before people suspected of being Soviet spies had been convicted and spent time in prison.

“It would have been considered unseemly to make a trade right after they were captured,” he said. “It was believed that these were serious offenses and they needed to pay a price.”

Mr. Smith said that he did not know the details of the current case but that if Washington was indeed in the midst of a hasty prisoner exchange, “it’s fair to infer that these charges are not at the same level of seriousness.”

Mr. Sutyagin’s case resembled in one respect that of the 10 accused Russians. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan did not charge them with espionage because F.B.I. investigators apparently found no evidence that they had acquired classified information. And Mr. Sutyagin, an arms control researcher who worked for the Institute for the U.S. and Canadian Studies, a Moscow research organization, argued during his trial that he had no access to state secrets.

A physicist by training, Mr. Sutyagin was arrested in 1999 and accused of passing secrets about nuclear submarines to a British company that prosecutors claimed was a front for the C.I.A. He was convicted in 2004 and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Human rights organizations at the time criticized Mr. Sutyagin’s prosecution, saying it suggested a Soviet-style wariness of contacts between Russian scientists and foreigners.

Ms. Sutyagina said the authorities had tried for 11 years to compel her son to confess to being an American spy. He signed the confession this week, she said, in part to help the suspects in the United States avoid prison time.

“He knows what it is to be in prison,” she said. “He doesn’t want to accept responsibility for letting those people go to prison.”

F.B.I. officials, who saw the long investigation as a triumph for the bureau, declined to comment on Wednesday. But John P. Slattery, a former top F.B.I. counterintelligence official, said investigators might be disappointed to see it end with an exchange.

“The individuals who ran the wires and did the surveillance may feel some frustration,” said Mr. Slattery, now with BAE Systems Intelligence and Security. “There would be some heartache in not seeing these guys do some jail time. But there are larger U.S. intelligence equities and policy considerations at stake, and they would understand that.”



Benjamin Weiser and Colin Moynihan reported from New York, and Ellen Barry from Moscow. Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, Mark Mazzetti from Washington, and Andrew E. Kramer from Moscow.