New Delhi: Russia’s premier security intelligence agency, the Federal Security Service or FSB, has detained Evan Gershkovich, a reporter for the American business daily Wall Street Journal, in an apparent retaliation for the arrest of Sergey Cherkasov, a student at Johns Hopkins University alleged to have been a Russian spy.
The two arrests seem eerily similar to the Cold War period of rivalry between Soviet and American intelligence agencies.
Cherkasov, US agencies suspect, was trying to infiltrate the International Criminal Court at Hague using a false identity.
An indictment made public on Saturday accuses Cherkasov as an elite “illegal” operative of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency. According to the indictment, Cherkasov posed as Brazilian citizen Victor Muller Ferreira over a long time, a report in The Guardian said.
The FSB alleged Thursday that Gershkovich was trying to obtain classified information in the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg.
Specifically, FSB accused Gershkovich, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, of “acting on the instruction of the American side, collecting classified information about the activities of one of the enterprises of the Russian military-industrial complex that constitutes a state secret”.
“The Wall Street Journal is deeply concerned for the safety of Mr Gershkovich,” the publication said in a statement.
This is believed to be the first time an American journalist was picked up by Russian agencies on allegations of espionage since the Cold War. The arrest also comes on the heels of spiralling US-Russia ties as the Ukraine conflict enters its 14th month.
Gershkovich, 31, was covering the Russia-Ukraine war for the WSJ, and was with the AFP and Moscow Times prior to that.
Previously, there have been multiple incidents of US and Russian agencies accusing and expelling different individuals from the two countries for espionage.
Recent high-profile espionage cases that made news were of US Marine veteran Paul Whelan and basketball player Brittney Griner who was swapped for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout in 2022.
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Aldrich Ames, a mole in CIA
After the fall of the Soviet Union, in 1994, Aldrich Ames, an operative in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), was picked up by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on charges of espionage.
He was accused of spying for the Soviets and then the Russians in 1985. Ames was a case officer for the CIA, who specialised in the Russian language and also the Soviet intelligence agencies.
“On April 16, 1985, while assigned to the CIA’s Soviet/East European Division at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, he secretly volunteered to (Russian spy agency) KGB officers at the USSR Embassy, Washington, D.C. Shortly thereafter, the KGB paid him $50,000,” the FBI states on its website.
Between 1985 and 1989, during postings in Colombia and Italy, Ames continued to pass on critical intelligence to the Soviets. He returned to the US in 1989 and continued his information-gathering activity for the Soviets. Ames resorted to “dead drops” or prearranged hiding places for sending his information across to the Soviet agencies, according to the FBI.
Ames continued to be paid large sums of money for these operations. This wealth proved to be his undoing as the FBI got suspicious about his finances and launched an investigation.
“FBI special agents and investigative specialists conducted intensive physical and electronic surveillance of Ames during a 10-month investigation. Searches of Ames’s residence revealed documents and other information linking Ames to the Russian foreign intelligence service,” the agency states on its website.
In April 1994, both Ames and his wife Rosario pleaded guilty. Ames was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, while his wife got 63 months in jail.
Russia accuses US citizen of biological espionage
In January, the FSB announced that it had started proceedings against an unnamed US citizen for “biological espionage”.
The Moscow Times reported that “Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) alleged that the American national collected intelligence information of a biological nature aimed against Russia’s security”.
However, the identity of the alleged spy was not revealed. Neither were any further details of the charges and whether the individual had been arrested.
“The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation initiated a criminal case against a US citizen on the grounds of a crime under the 276 ‘Espionage’ Article of the Criminal Code,” the FSB had said in a statement.
US expels 12 Russian diplomats
Last year, the US expelled 12 Russian diplomats from the country on allegations of espionage. At the United Nations in February 2022, it accused the Russian diplomats of espionage and announced that it was expelling them.
The US declared that the diplomats had been working “as intelligence operatives (and) had been engaging in espionage activities that are adverse to our (American) national security”.
Consequently, Politico reported that in May 2022, while the US airspace was closed for Russia, a Russian transport aircraft Ilyushin Il-96 departed from St Petersburg for Washington Dulles Airport to pick up the diplomats.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)