Nuclear Physicist Faces Retrial for High Treason

Nuclear Physicist Faces Retrial for High Treason

Created: 16.06.2004 15:53 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:53 MSK

Alexei Tarasov

The Moscow News

Russia’s Supreme Court overturned the not-guilty verdict handed down by a jury in the case of Valentin Danilov, a Krasnoyarsk-based nuclear physicist, late last year. The specialist in plasma physics, who was instrumental in greatly extending the service life of domestic orbital spacecrafts, is once again being charged with spying for China, as well as with financial fraud. He is once again facing 20 years in a high-security prison, which to a 55-year old scientist is tantamount to a life sentence: More than four years of jitters, 580 days of custody, and 39 court hearings have left him with a multitude of health problems.

And now it is starting all over again. Once again, Nobel Prize winner Vitaly Ginzburg, who strongly defended his colleague, is saying that the case against Danilov is in fact aimed against Russia. Only now, six months after the acquittal, Danilov’s chances for success look increasingly slim. What has happened during this time? A sentence has been passed on Igor Sutyagin. In Valentin Danilov’s own admission, he was discouraged by both the alacrity with which the jury dealt with the Sutyagin case and their verdict: No leniency.

“All the indications are that the outcome of my case is a foregone conclusion because it is not criminal but purely political. At any rate, this ruling by the Supreme Court, unjust and unjustified, did not come as a surprise to me,” Danilov said. “The head of the Federal Security Service regional directorate press service and a whole TV camera crew were flying on the same plane with me to Moscow for the trial. The state security people already knew the result. They might at least have observed the proprieties — you know, by pretending that they did not. They seem to have recovered from the shock after their resounding defeat in court, last December, when they thought that it was all in the bag and that the jury would vote in their favor 12:0 (then eight jurors out of 12 found Danilov not guilty on all counts. — A.T.).”

Letting the Cat Out of the Bag

The legal grounds for challenging a jury verdict, as opposed to a verdict passed by professional judges, are very limited. Nonetheless, the Krasnoyarsk Krai Prosecutor’s Office decided to go ahead, and scored an interim victory. The Supreme Court partially upheld the Prosecutor’s Office’s argument, sending the case back to Krasnoyarsk for a new hearing by a different court. According to Yelena Yevmenova, Danilov’s defense counsel, the decision as to which particular judge is to handle it will be made in about a month. The physicist himself believes that the new trial will be swift because his case seems to have been “expedited”: The Supreme Court handed down the ruling far too quickly.

The court found substantial violations of procedural rules that apparently affected the jury verdict: Importantly, violations of the Code of Criminal Procedure were made by both the defense and the prosecution, as well as by the presiding judge — like a number of “technical inaccuracies” pointed to by a Supreme Court judge.

Yevmenova noted that enclosed with the prosecutor’s office’s appeal were statements by three jurors alleging pressure on the part of the defense (apparently one of the jurors even got into a road accident because of that). The defense counsel claims that these statements have similar wording, coming to the conclusion that the prosecutor’s office presumably questioned the jurors, thus disclosing the secrecy of the jury conference: Otherwise how would the prosecutor’s office have known who voted and how? The lawyer also said that on Monday, when she returned to Krasnoyarsk, she would file a lawsuit over protection of her business reputation since the Supreme Court threw out the prosecutor’s office claim that Yevmenova had exerted undue pressure on the jury.

In Defense of the Physicist

It will be recalled that the Federal Security Service (FSB) accused Danilov of selling classified information to China. The scientist signed a contract to produce a simulator modeling the integrated impact of the space environment on satellites, and to develop related software. This is a dual-use facility. Furthermore, the information that was passed to the Chinese side purportedly contained data on yet another piece of equipment — a lab simulator of casualty/damage producing elements of nuclear weapon systems. This device has an exclusively military purpose.

According to counterintelligence agencies, the scientist and his Chinese partners were detained just as they were concluding the contract on the transfer of this second simulator. Later the charge of high treason was expanded to include “financial fraud”: Allegedly, Danilov misappropriated 466,000 rubles that the Chinese paid as an advance for what was essentially team work.

Danilov’s own comments on his never-ending case, as well as comments by his numerous defenders from various international research centers, boil down to a well known formula: “It’s like a guinea-pig — it’s neither a guinea nor a pig.” That is to say, to them, there is simply no case in the legal sense of the word because there is no evidence that state secrets were actually sold (a fact that the jury agreed with). What Danilov passed to the Chinese were exclusively non-secret materials, available in the public domain, that were declassified way back in 1992. All of his cooperation was sanctioned by the authorities. But then, Danilov believes, intelligence and security services took then-Security Council Secretary Sergei Ivanov’s statement on tightening control over space technology leaks at face value.

Letters in the physicist’s defense were signed by many scientists and politicians. Russian men of letters also appealed to the prosecutor’s office: “A treaty has been signed with China, covering, among other things, joint space research programs. Now as a result of the ’Danilov case,’ our state for the umpteenth time is sustaining losses running into tens of thousands of dollars while possibly losing out on the vast Chinese market in this sphere of science.” People who came out in defense of the physicist said that the Chinese, rebuffed by the FSB, had to use European Space Agency know-how and so the money earmarked for Russia went to Europe. In Danilov’s estimate, the FSB Investigations Department caused science at least $5 million worth of damages. This is the cost of training Chinese specialists and the contribution that China pledged to joint fundamental research programs.

A Bitter Victory

This is not the first time that Danilov and his supporters have had to start everything from scratch. For various reasons, consideration of his case was repeatedly suspended or stopped and then it had to begin all over again. An assistant judge was removed from the bench, for example, after criticizing the behavior of an FSB officer.

In short, thus far the state has not had much luck with either people’s assessors or with jurors in the Danilov case.

Danilov himself has always taken it in stride: “Physics always has models. Events always happen in a series. Say there is a random, separate event that has its own probability rate. Rare events also come in series. You won the lottery but then a brick fell on your head. So I am terribly afraid of all wins.” Danilov said this when he was already released from custody pending trial but had yet to win in court.