Canadian citizen had state secrets: lawyer
CANADIAN APPEARS IN RUSSIAN COURT, HEARS ALLEGATION OF SECRETS GIVEN BEFORE ARREST
Paul Whelan, a Canadian citizen and former U.S. Marine facing espionage charges in Russia, was arrested in a Moscow hotel while receiving a USB stick that was alleged to contain state secrets, his lawyer said. Whelan believed the USB stick had photographs and information about a church he visited, said his lawyer Vladimir Zherebenkov.
FSB security agents swooped in and seized him before he could see what was on the flash drive.
In the first public appearance since he was detained at the end of December, Moscow City Court refused to grant bail to Whelan on Tuesday, leaving him in pre-trial detention in the infamous Lefortovo jail at least until Feb 28. He faces 10 to 20 years in prison.
Whelan was kept in a glass cage and did not speak to reporters.
Zherebenkov said that Whelan was a frequent visitor to Russia and that he asked an unnamed person to email him something about travel around the country. Whelan reportedly was not able to download it and then asked that person to put it on a flash-drive.
“He was expecting to see on the flash drive some personal information like pictures or vid- eos, something like that, about that person’s previous trips around Russia,” Zherebenkov told reporters. “We don’t know how the materials that contain state secrets ended up there.”
The lawyer said the American was detained before he could open the files. He added that it was not clear what has happened to the person who reportedly gave the flash drive to Whelan.
His lawyer added: “He has a lot of acquaintances here. For him all these meetings, all these contacts were ordinary and connected with the culture of the country, nothing more.
“He didn’t think these were state secrets, as he himself said, ‘I’m a friend of Russia’.”
Whelan’s family insist he was entrapped and denied that he was guilty of espionage.
Whelan’s twin brother, David, who lives in Toronto, said in a statement that the family was disappointed but hardly surprised by the denial of bail.
“While we still lack any details from the Russian government about why Paul is thought to be a spy, and who provided him with the alleged state secrets, we are certain that he was entrapped and is not guilty of espionage.”
He added that his brother, who also holds British and Irish citizenship, is “also concerned about translator support and his ability to present his defence in English.”
David Whelan noted that the Russian authorities’ refusal to allow British diplomats to visit his brother in prison and the cancellation of a U.S. consular visit last week raised additional concerns, but said that Canadian diplomats were scheduled to visit on Thursday.
The arrest raised speculation that Whelan could be swapped for one of the Russians held in the U.S., such as gun rights activist Maria Butina, who has pleaded guilty to acting as a foreign agent in the U.S.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that for foreigners, documents can be a dangerous thing.
In 1986, Nicholas Daniloff was the Moscow correspondent for U.S. News and World Report when a Russian friend handed him a plastic bag containing photos from Central Asia.
Unbeknownst to Daniloff, the package also contained maps of Soviet deployments in Afghanistan that were marked “secret.”
“Suddenly a minibus drove up alongside me,” he recalled in a recent article for The Washington Post. “Six men jumped out. Several of them surrounded me, pinned my arms behind my back and handcuffed me before shoving me into the van.”
Daniloff was eventually released in a trade for Gennadi Zakharov, a Soviet physicist working for the United Nations who had been arrested in the United States for espionage-related activities shortly before Daniloff was taken into custody.
“The Russians are experts at setting people up or framing them,” Daniloff said by email on Tuesday.
“A certain degree of habitual paranoia is no bad thing,” said Mark Galleotti, a fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague.
Galleotti, a British academic who tracks Russian criminal networks and frequently conducts research in Moscow, said he has to be cautious about people who promise to give him information: “If it’s not someone that I know very well or something that I was expecting, I wouldn’t take something that I don’t know what it is.”
According to the writer Stephen Boykewich, the practice of giving westerners secret documents in a bid to ensnare them was a known practice when he worked as a journalist in Moscow in 2007.