Spying arrests threaten US-Russia detente

President Obama is said to be unhappy about the FBI's timing, amid fears that a diplomatic incident could undo the headway he has made repairing relations.

MOSCOW // Russian officials yesterday denounced claims by US authorities of a sophisticated Russian spy ring attempting to infiltrate US policymaking circles to collect sensitive intelligence.

US authorities announced on Monday that they had arrested 10 alleged Russian spies for operating under deep cover, many of them under assumed identities, in an operation purportedly dating back to the presidency of Bill Clinton. The announcement came on the heels of last week's visit to the United States by Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, who met his US counterpart, Barack Obama. Washington has championed a "reset" in its relations with Moscow after years of tensions under the previous US administration of George W Bush. Russian officials yesterday suggested that the arrests could threaten the thaw.

In a statement yesterday, the Russian foreign ministry said the allegations were aimed at "pursuing unseemly goals" and were reminiscent of the "spy hysteria" of the Cold War era. "In any case, it is deeply unfortunate that all of this is happening against the backdrop of the 'reset' of Russian-US relations declared by the US administration itself," the statement said. An unidentified official in Mr Obama's administration was quoted by The New York Times as saying that the US president was unhappy about the timing of the arrests but that the FBI pressed on because of fears that the suspects might flee the country.

Ten suspects are currently in custody in the United States, while a man believed to be the 11th suspect, Robert Christopher Metsos, 55, was arrested at Larnaca airport in Cyprus yesterday while trying to fly to Budapest. Mr Metsos was released on bail of ?20,000 (Dh73,459) and was to appear in court within 30 days. The criminal complaint filed on Monday in a US federal court in Manhattan was brimming with lurid details of alleged spycraft employed by the suspects, who are charged with secretly operating as agents of a foreign government, a crime punishable by up to five years in prison.

The suspects communicated with each other and their handlers using technology such as encrypted computer images, invisible ink, and "coded bursts of data sent from a radio transmitter" known as "radiograms", according to the FBI affidavit. They are accused of operating at the behest of Russia's foreign intelligence service, or SVR, and going as far as South America to collect cash for their operations.

The intelligence they were allegedly gathering included the White House's position on nuclear proliferation, information on Afghanistan and Iran's nuclear ambitions and Mr Obama's goals ahead of his July 2009 summit with Mr Medvedev, according to the FBI affidavit. The FBI claims it decrypted an encoded message from the SVR to two of the suspects last year that sheds light on the alleged spies' long-term goal. The message, written in clunky English, reads in part as follows: "You were sent to USA for long-term service trip. Your education, bank accounts, car, house etc. - all these serve one goal: fulfill your main mission, i.e. to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US and send intels [intelligence reports] to C[enter]."

Nine of the suspects are accused of conspiring to commit money laundering, punishable by up to 20 years in prison. All countries maintain intelligence agents abroad, said the Russian parliamentarian Vladimir Gruzdev, himself a former SVR officer. But the timing and the scale of the espionage case is certain to damage the detente between the two countries, he said. "There is a contradiction here, in my opinion," Mr Gruzdev said. "The message is that we're friends in this area and not friends in this other area."

As in other countries, Russian security agencies as a rule do not comment on intelligence matters. An SVR spokesman said yesterday that he would not comment and referred all inquiries to Russia's foreign ministry. But the Russian parliamentarian Nikolai Kovalyov, the former head of Russia's federal security service - the main successor agency to the Soviet KGB - ridiculed the allegations against the suspected spies as something out of a "cheap detective novel".

"Eleven people who worked together and knew each other. That provokes Homeric laughter in any professional," Mr Kovalyov told the state-run RIA-Novosti news agency. The former Russian spy chief posited that the suspects were merely money launderers labelled spies at the behest of hawkish elements in the US government to damage relations between the two countries. Matthew Clements, Eurasia analyst at the Country Risk department of IHS Jane's in London, said the effects of the case on US-Russian relations would depend largely on the "scale of the investigation and the charges brought against those accused".

"Certainly Russia seems unhappy about it, though I wouldn't expect anything but a short-term complication," Mr Clement said yesterday. "It won't alter the overall direction of relations. I don't think it will include a major row." @Email:[e-mail]