Sutyagin: Thrown Under the Bus?

Haven't we met before in Moscow? No, I believe it was Vienna...

OK, so by now everyone knows that we've swapped out the 10 Russian sleeper agents for first one, but now apparently four people convicted of espionage in Russia. I wanted to avoid commenting on this until everything was said and done, because I thought it was just too fantastic to be true; boy was I wrong.

I really just have one quick point to stress: I am a bit disturbed by the inclusion of Igor Sutyagin, a former scientist and non-proliferation expert, with the three former SVR and FSB officers mentioned in the Times article. The details of Sutyagin's case are pretty complex, but the consensus is among Russian human rights types that Sutyagin was never guilty of espionage; rather, much like Aleksandr Nikitin, he was caught up in a wave of post-Soviet crackdowns on legitimate academics and scientists by a security service that failed to understand the new era of cooperation with Western institutions. That's a biased statement, but I believe it's mainly accurate.

Anyway, the inclusion of Sutyagin with the three former Russian intelligence officers in this swap is troubling because it muddies the waters of Sutyagin's innocence, in a way justifying the FSB pogrom launched against him and those like him in the late 1990s. Including him in the spy swap appears to corroborate the Russian government's accusations in a way that could endanger future academic cooperation with the West, extending the already massive chilling effect of the intelligence crackdown even further.

Yet at the same time, if Sutyagin was not actually guilty of espionage, why would he be on the list of people we wanted released? Was it out of humanitarian concern? There's some precedent for that, in the case of Natan Sharansky, but the campaign for his release was much more vocal than that for Sutyagin, it Sharansky's freedom had great political symbolism for the Reagan administration, then locked in an ideological battle with the "evil empire."

Another possibility is that this was part of the much-ballyhooed "reset" effort. If the this was the case, then this decision and the implications hinted at above (further pressure on scientists and academics by Russia's intelligence services), may represent a troubling retrenchment by the US, favoring a pragmatic improvement of relations with Russia over the human rights and freedoms of people like Sutyagin. While there are times when such pragmatism is highly beneficial, the potential ramifications in this case are worrisome--especially at a time when Russian efforts to draw in high-tech foreign investment will surely entail greater collaboration between Western and Russian scientists.

Don't get me wrong: I'm extremely happy to see Sutyagin walk free. But I'm very concerned about the circumstances that got him there.