University embroiled in spy plot
By Richard Warburton, Birmingham Post
A Midland stately home and the University of Birmingham unwittingly found themselves at the centre of an international espionage scandal which ended with a Russian spy being jailed for 15 years.
A Moscow court sentenced Igor Sutyagin to a maximum security prison after finding him guilty of passing on information on nuclear submarines and missile-warning systems while he was attending a University of Birmingham conference at Wast Hills House, Kings Norton, in February 1998.
While staying at the stately home, which was formerly owned by the Cadbury family, Sutyagin met officials from British firm Alternative Futures, which prosecutors claimed was a front for the CIA.
Sutyagin, who was convicted of treason in the form of espionage by a jury in Moscow, maintained that the analyses he wrote and passed on were based on open sources and that he had no reason to believe the British company was a US intelligence cover.
The 39-year-old attended the conference as a representative of the USA-Canada Institute, a Moscow thinktank, and repeatedly protested his innocence.
A physicist and historian from the town of Obninsk, a Soviet-era closed town of scientists south of Moscow, Sutyagin joined the Moscow thinktank as a postgraduate student in 1988 and had risen to head its military-political studies department by the time he was arrested.
After meeting with Alternative Futures in Birmingham, Sutyagin agreed to work for the London-based firm as a consultant.
He flew to meet officials from the company in Warsaw and Budapest, receiving a fee of £14,000, and was arrested by Russian security agents in Moscow in 1999.
Alternative Futures and its consultant, Sean Kidd, then vanished, leaving Russian officials to believe it was linked to the CIA.
The Moscow City Court sentenced Sutyagin to 15 years in a maximum security prison and ruled that his prison term be counted from the moment of his detention.
"I absolutely do not consider myself guilty," Sutyagin maintained after the sentencing. "All my guilt is that I had contacts with foreigners."
His lawyer German Gavryunin said "the defence categorically does not agree with the punishment" and added that they would be appealing against the sentence in the Supreme Court.
Human rights advocates said the case demonstrated the renewed grip of the Federal Security Service, the KGB's main successor, which was deeply suspicious of Russian scientists' contacts with foreigners.
They claim its agents had been emboldened by the rise of ex-KGB agent and FSB director Vladimir Putin to the presidency.
Courts have only challenged a small number of similar cases.
In December, a jury acquitted Valentin Danilov, a professor at Krasnoyarsk Technical University in Siberia who had been charged with selling classified information on space technology to China and misappropriating university funds.
A University of Birmingham spokeswoman yesterday said Wast Hills House was owned by the university and was used to hold conferences which people attended from all over the world.
