The Sutyagin Syndrome

This week brought bad news for Amnesty International and other human rights activists. They had declared Igor Sutyagin, former defense analyst at the Moscow-based Institute for U.S.A. and Canada Studies who had been serving 15 years in prison on trumped-up espionage charges, a political prisoner and had fought to prove his complete innocence. ? 

Sutyagin and three other people in Russian custody were traded for the 10 spies arrested in the United States two weeks ago. The United States initiated the trade. The three other people who came with Sutyagin were secret agents and traitors.

Sutyagin, who specialized in Russia’s nuclear weapons development, deployment and control, did not distribute classified information. The data he collected was about as secret as the open-source information gathered by the 10 Russian “illegals.”

The problem was that Sutyagin gave information to a phantom British company called Alternative Futures. The company claimed to provide investment advisers, but also took a particularly strong interest in Russia’s nuclear submarines. What’s more, the firm was registered to British citizens Nadia Locke and Sean Kidd, who do not even exist.

In Russia, a scientist can end up behind bars for something that would make him a millionaire in the West.

Scientist Ivan Petkov also landed in jail for 5 1/2 years for attempting to set up the manufacture of synthetic sapphires overseas.

Physicist Valentin Danilov was given a 14-year sentence for espionage for passing supposedly classified information to the Chinese about the effects of space on Earth’s satellites.

? Up until the swap deal was proposed, Sutyagin never admitted any guilt in the espionage case that the state brought against him. In this way, he showed courage as well as the pragmatism and calculation of a good analyst. Although admitting guilt might have resulted in a lesser sentence, it would have put an end to his career.

In the Sutyagin case, the human rights activists showed the same herd mentality that Russia’s hardened patriots display. They demonstrated a remarkable infantilism and willingness to believe in the innocence of anyone from among their own ranks — that is, from the intelligentsia. If Sutyagin said he was innocent, he must be a victim of the regime.

There was a similar case in Germany in 2008. Werner Greipl, an engineer for the French-German helicopter manufacturer Eurocopter, gave the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service technical data regarding civil helicopters for a fee of 13,000 euros ($16,000). After his arrest, Greipl admitted his guilt but argued that the data was not classified. As a result, he was given an 11-month suspended sentence. And German society never thought to accuse the state of wrongly arresting a person who was merely passing along unclassified information.

It is difficult to say how many years Sutyagin would have received if he had behaved as Greipl did. Unfortunately, the Sutyagin case will do more to hurt the defense of unfairly jailed scientists than anything else.