THE GRAINY film shows a man strolling on a leafy Moscow street, apparently holding a Palm Pilot.
Suddenly he ducks into the bushes as if to answer a call of nature. He then reaches down to touch an object, about the size of a loaf of bread, on the ground.
In another clip, a man stops by the same spot to fill his car with anti-freeze and glances towards the object, apparently a rock. A third shows a man with a rucksack picking the rock up and taking it away.
At first glance the footage aired Sunday night on Rossiya, the state television channel, looks innocent enough. But this, according to Russia’s security service, is nothing less than Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in action late last year.
The men, it said, were all spies working under cover at the British Embassy in Moscow. And the mysterious object was a high-tech telecommunications device concealed inside a fake rock and planted in a park in a Moscow suburb. Passing agents could transmit secret information to this electronic dead letter box through a simple hand-held computer.
The accusation plunged Russia and Britain into their worst espionage row in a decade yesterday, with a real possibility of tit-for-tat expulsions and long-term damage to relations between the two supposedly friendly countries.
Moscow said that the the fate of four alleged British “spies” would be “considered at a political level” while London said that if punished, it would observe its established policy and “reciprocate”.
The Rossiya report identified the four alleged spies as Marc Doe, a second secretary in the political section, Paul Crompton, a third secretary in the political section, and Christopher Pirt and Andrew Fleming, both researchers without diplomatic status. It also alleged that a Russian citizen who had contacts with the four had been detained and confessed to espionage.
“Everything in the programme was accurate,” a spokesman for the Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor of the Soviet KGB, told The Times. “Four British diplomats are suspected.”
The British Embassy declined to comment on whether the four accused men were still in Russia, but Mr Crompton remained at his desk yesterday. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office said that it was surprised by the allegations, and denied any misconduct.
Whether or not the allegations are true, Russia would be unlikely to pick such a fight with Britain without some evidence, only three weeks after taking over the presidency of the G8 group of leading industrialised nations for the first time, analysts said.
But British sources said that the Russian action appeared to be less an attempt to humiliate an old Cold War adversary than an attempt by the Kremlin to justify President Putin’s controversial decision last week to sign a new law imposing draconian restrictions on the activities of non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
The Russian authorities have justified the move by claiming that Western intelligence services are using NGOs to foment a revolution like those that rocked Georgia in 2003 and Ukraine in 2004.
The Rossiya report showed a document, signed by Mr Doe, authorising a transfer of £23,000 in October 2004 to the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia’s oldest human rights organisation. Another document allegedly cleared a £5,719 grant to the Eurasia Foundation, which promotes the independent media, among other projects.
The report said that Mr Doe, as head of the Foreign Office’s Global Opportunities Fund in Moscow, was the main embassy contact for NGOs and had signed off on grants to at least 12 groups.
“This is the first time we literally caught them red-handed in the process of contacting their agents here and received evidence that they finance a number of non-governmental organisations,” Sergei Ignatchenko, the FSB spokesman, said.
But Britain admits providing about £500,000 annually to fund Russian organisations involved in human rights, the environment, governance and democracy. “It is well-known that the British Government has financially supported projects implemented by Russian NGOs in the field of human rights and civil society,” a Foreign Office statement said. “All our assistance is given openly and aims to support the development of a healthy civil society in Russia.”
Most Russian NGOs accuse the Kremlin of trying to stifle the last independent sector of Russian society, having already silenced its critics in parliament, business and the media.
Lyudmila Alexeyeva, a Soviet-era dissident who heads the Moscow Helsinki Group, said that the organisation had recieved British Embassy grants, but argued that the scandal was an attempt to smear the group and justify the crackdown on NGOs. She insisted that some of the documents shown on television were fakes.
The television report was also seen as a publicity coup for the FSB, which has come under attack for failing to prevent a series of terrorist attacks, including the Beslan school siege in 2004 by Chechen rebels.
Sergei Ignatchenko, a spokesman for the FSB, said it was the result of a special operation by Russian counter-intelligence service over several months.
After the rock device was found, Russian security agents scoured Moscow for others and found a second one, but British agents managed to retrieve it, he said. The FSB decided to go public after confronting the declared MI6 representative in Moscow and asking him to cease intelligence operations in Russia. “They told us they were not engaged in espionage in Russia,” he said. Last night Britain was still waiting to see how Moscow would act. If it follows the revelations with expulsions, it can expect an immediate response in kind.
Tit-for-tat expulsions from Moscow and London were common in Soviet times, but there have been none since 1996, when Moscow expelled nine British diplomats who, it said, were running a spy ring. Britain then expelled four Russians.
CAUGHT IN THE ACT
April 2004 Weapons expert Igor Sutyagin convicted of treason and passing classified military information to a British company alleged to be a front for the CIA. Sentenced to 15 years in prison
July 2000 Junior Russian diplomat Platon Obukhov, the son of a former Soviet deputy foreign minister, sentenced to 11 years in prison for spying for Britain. Verdict overturned by Russian Supreme Court
May 1996 Russia expels nine British diplomats it claims are running a spy ring. Britain responds by throwing out four Russians
April 1994 Britain throws out a Russian diplomat in response to Moscow's expulsion of a man described as the head of British intelligence in Russia
Jan 1994 Russian company manager Vadim Sintsov arrested for spying for Britain; sentenced to ten years’ hard labour
September 1971 More than 100 Soviet officials expelled from Britain for spying. They are exposed by Oleg Lyalin, first Soviet intelligence agent to defect since the Second World War. Russia responds by expelling 18 British embassy staff from Moscow
