MOSCOW, Russia, – The Russian Federal Security Service said they have new evidence proving that Fulbright scholar and Connecticut native John Tobin may be a spy-in-training and interrogation expert.
Russian security officials said that they might bring espionage charges against John Tobin, a U.S. Fulbright scholar from Connecticut who was jailed on a drug conviction in Russia — a claim his lawyers called a dubious legal bid to keep Tobin behind bars.
A spokesman for the Federal Security Service, the main successor to the KGB, said in a telephone interview that the new accusations against Tobin could be based on the testimony of a Russian scholar who claimed Tobin tried to recruit him as a spy for the United States. The spokesman for the security service’s head office in Moscow refused to give his name.
Pavel Bolshunov, an FSB spokesman in the southern city of Voronezh, said that the scientist, Dmitry Kuznetsov, named Tobin as an agent who interrogated him in a U.S. prison in January 1998.
Kuznetsov, an expert on toxic agents who had been arrested on fraud charges a month before, said Tobin had sought information on his scientific research and contacts among other Russian scholars.
Bolshunov, who is a subordinate to Moscow, said that authorities were still examining the evidence from Kuznetsov’s testimony and that no new action against Tobin has been taken so far. He also said that the case was complicated because Tobin’s alleged attempt to recruit Kuznetsov took place in the United States and not Russia.
“Kuznetsov’s evidence shows that we were right in suspecting Tobin to be a U.S. intelligence agent,” Bolshunov said.
Tobin was arrested in January on charges of obtaining, possessing and distributing marijuana. The otherwise routine case attracted broad attention when Russian security officials publicly accused him of being a spy in training and an alleged interrogation expert. These claims came amid a series of spy scandals between the United States and Russia earlier this year.
There were no espionage charges filed, and Tobin has said in e-mail correspondence that he was framed because he refused to become a spy for Russia.
Tobin’s lawyer Maxim Bayev, responding to the new accusations, said, “I think they wanted to stir up tension to prevent the court from setting Tobin free.”
A court in Voronezh sentenced Tobin to 37 months in prison in April, but earlier this month a higher court reduced the sentence to a year on appeal.
Bayev had filed a second appeal to the Voronezh Regional Court on June 18th, which is to be heard within 30 days. Bayev said that Tobin could be freed as early as next month.
The congressman who represents Tobin in the U.S. House of Representatives, James Maloney, a Republican from Connecticut, said today that he plans to send a letter to President George W. Bush asking him to intervene in the case. In the letter, Maloney wrote a warning to the President, saying that filing espionage charges against Tobin could harm U.S. and Russian relations.
Tobin’s mother lives in Sullivan County in upstate New York.
Kuznetsov, the scientist, told the FSB that Tobin promised him better conditions in the U.S. prison where he was being held, a positive outcome of his trial and a monetary reward if he cooperated, Bolshunov said. The Moskovsky Komsomolets Daily quoted Kuznetsov as saying that he had been held in a state prison in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Russia’s Interfax News Agency quoted Kuznetsov as saying that U.S. prison officials introduced Tobin to him as an FBI agent and Tobin also asked him to give his written opinion on several works on toxicology, in which Kuznetsov said that he did and later was paid for.
Kuznetsov said that several months later he was sentenced to a $2,500 fine and freed on the obligation that he would deliver 150 hours of free lectures in U.S. universities.
Kuznetsov, speaking to Interfax, said that he met with Tobin in a Voronezh jail to make “100 percent sure” that he was the U.S. official who interrogated him.
“Although Tobin pretended that he saw me for the first time, I immediately recognized that he was the FBI agent who tried to force me to cooperate in prison,” Kuznetsov said, according to Interfax. “He has a special, characteristic smile.”
Tobin, a native of Ridgefield, Connecticut, was doing political research at a university in Voronezh, about 500 kilometers (300 miles) south of Moscow, when he was arrested outside a local nightclub on the drug charges. He has insisted on his innocence on the charges.
