MOSCOW: Russia charged that Britain is running a James Bond-style spying operation in Moscow and claimed it had been caught "red-handed" while funding pressure groups.
A programme on Rossiya TV, the state television, Monday said four British diplomats had used a high-power transmitter hidden in a fake rock on a Moscow street to gather secret information. The FSB state security service, which later confirmed the report, said the spies, working as diplomats at the British embassy, had been apprehended while funding NGOs.
However, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, head of Moscow Helsinki Group, the human rights group named in the report, said the government's underlying target could the NGOs themselves, whose activities were curbed by a law signed this month by President Vladimir Putin.
The FSB did not say why the funding was illegal. A spokesperson for FSB said the most important thing is that "we caught them red-handed while they were in contact with their agents (and established) that they were financing some non-governmental organisations".
The new enactment bans foreign funding of any NGO with "political purposes", though it does not spell out what this means.
Putin had said the West is using NGOs as political instruments in fomenting unrest in the country.
The British foreign office denied the allegations in London, saying the country is open in its support of the NGOs and their projects "in the field of human rights and civil society".
Rossiya TV, which aired the programme, named the four British diplomats and described them as spies and said one of them was Moscow station head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service. The programme showed video footage of the imitation rock lying in snow by a roadside. A man identified as one of the diplomats walked up, picked it up with some effort and made off with it.
Russia is just starting its presidency of the Group of Eight industrialised nations.
Britain spends 500,000 pounds in support of NGO programmes in Russia. "It is all totally above board. That's what is so surprising about this," a British official said.
Posted
on : Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:30 GMT | General News
By : Chris Rowe
|
