https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/08

Simplicissimus 22/01/2019

Ex-U.S. marine held in Russia for spying was misled, says lawyer | Reuters
▻https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-espionage-whelan-idUSKCN1PG0Y4

https://s3.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20190122&t=2&i=1348457427&w=1200&r=LYNXNPEF0L0LM#.jpg

Former U.S. marine Paul Whelan, who was detained by Russia’s FSB security service on suspicion of spying, looks out of a defendants’ cage before a court hearing in Moscow, Russia January 22, 2019.
REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov

The lawyer for a former U.S. marine accused of spying by Russia said on Tuesday that his client had been misled before his arrest and believed that a thumb drive handed to him in a hotel room had contained holiday snaps rather than secret information.
Russia’s Federal Security Serviced detained Paul Whelan, who holds U.S., British, Canadian and Irish passports, in a Moscow hotel room on Dec. 28.
Whelan appeared in a Moscow court on Tuesday, where a judge rejected a release on bail. If found guilty of espionage, he could be jailed for up to 20 years.
Whelan, who denies the charges, was detained after receiving a thumb drive containing a list of all the employees of a secret Russian state agency, the Russian online news portal Rosbalt.ru reported this month.
Rosbalt cited an unnamed Russian intelligence source as saying that Whelan had been spying for 10 years, using the internet to identify targets from whom he could obtain information, and that the list he was caught with had long been of interest to U.S. spies.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov appeared to support that version of events, later telling reporters Whelan had been “caught red-handed” carrying out “specific illegal actions” in his hotel room.
But Vladimir Zherebenkov, Whelan’s lawyer, said on Tuesday that his client had accepted the information unknowingly.
“Paul was actually meant to receive information from an individual that was not classified,” Zherebenkov told reporters.
“These were cultural things, a trip to a cathedral, Paul’s holiday ... photographs. But as it turned out, it (the thumb drive) contained classified information.”
The lawyer said Whelan had not been able to see what was on the thumb drive because he had been detained before he had a chance to do so.

#Russia

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Simplicissimus 22/01/2019

McFaul: Whelan’s Arrest Is ‘Very Strange’ – Foreign Policy
(article du 8/01/2019)
▻https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/08/mcfaul-whelans-arrest-is-very-strange

The former U.S. ambassador to Russia says the former Marine’s detention doesn’t fit the pattern of previous ones.
[…]
_FP_spoke to former U.S. Ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who has himself been harshly criticized by the Russian government, about his experience in dealing with such arrests and why he has many unanswered questions about Paul Whelan’s detention. What follows is an edited version of that conversation.
[…]
FP: What for you is still to be answered? What are the big questions?
MM: Well the biggest one is what espionage was he doing. The story in the Russian press is quite convoluted, that he was asking for the names of some low-level officials on a USB drive. But you know that sounds all very strange to me. And again, the Russians are very good at counterintelligence—probably one of the best countries in the world at running that. They have extremely effective and pervasive monitoring systems in that country. If they caught him red-handed in this act, why haven’t we seen those photos? Why haven’t we seen tapes? That’s strange to me. And, by the way, they oftentimes make up this stuff. So it’s also even strange to me that they haven’t given us the made-up stuff as they’ve done with other people that they’ve detained. I want to learn more. This does not strike me as somebody familiar with intelligence operations in Russia. Mr. Whelan doesn’t strike me as a typical spy given his background. This doesn’t fit what I typically think of an intelligence operation inside Russia, which is a very risky place to do any kinds of operations. It doesn’t fit the normal standard operating procedure for me.
[…]
FP: Is it unusual that we haven’t heard from the president or the White House on this?
MM: No, I don’t know if it’s unusual or not. It’s striking to me how little the president’s talked about it. Not just talking about it but, do something about it. He has put forward a hypothesis about diplomacy that if he develops and nurtures these personal relationships with people like Putin, that will lead to concrete results that are good for the American people. He’s made that argument for years now. Well, here it is, here’s an American arrested.
FP: Trump has made it a point in the past of getting Americans held abroad released, he’s been quite proud of that.
MM: Exactly. Interacting with dictators and doing that as he did with the North Korean government. So, why not here? Maybe it’s happening behind the scenes, I don’t know, but I do think it’s odd.

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