Russian officials claim British spies used a device embedded in this fake stone to exchange secret information about Russia.
James Bond, it seems, is alive and well and kitted out with gadgets that Q would be proud of. Last week's story about British spies in Moscow allegedly communicating with each other via a fake rock containing sophisticated technology has evoked some entertaining memories of the gadgetry deployed in Cold War espionage. But it has some less amusing implications for Russia's civil rights organizations which are already under pressure from Russian President Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB spy.
Russian authorities are citing the case as evidence that western powers are funding non-governmental organizations, an allegation that is helping prepare the ground for a crackdown on NGOs the Kremlin views as a threat to its authority. The government earlier this month imposed tough new legal curbs on NGOs, allowing security and tax organs more control of them while restricting financing from abroad.
Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) claims that Marc Doe, one of the British diplomats alleged to have operated the rock, had authorized a number payments to Russian NGOs, including 23,000 pounds to the Moscow Helsinki Group, Russia's oldest civil rights group.
Putin, who signed the new NGO curbs into law on January 10, has said the spying scandal justifies the new legislation. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, spokeswoman for the Helsinki Group, said her group has received money from the British Foreign Office. She said she also knows Marc Doe, but as a diplomat, not as an agent. The problem is that London seems not to have established a clear division between its spies and its NGO helpers. And the implication is that Britain's James Bonds seem unwittingly to have done Russia's human rights campaigners a disservice in the process.
Human rights groups respond
A TV grab from Russian NTV channel shows a video of a person, allegedly a British embassy staff member walking on a street, to collect intelligence information provided by Russian agents, in a park outside Moscow.
"We deeply regret that such statements are possible today, 15 years after the fall of the Soviet regime in our country," said the statement, signed by 85 rights activists from dozens of organizations, including some singled out in the program. "This has reminded many people of the system of denunciation and slander in the shamefully well-known years of mass repression in the USSR."
Observers have said the scandal was tailored by Russian authorities to silence Western critics of the law. Russia's criticism does appear hypocritical given that the Kremlin finances Moscow-friendly opposition groups in Georgia, Moldavia and Ukraine. The Russian budget for this year contains €15 million earmarked for NGOs abroad. The Kremlin does not however regard this as interference. The money is helping "healthy forces" in those countries, according to the government.
But the January 22 television broadcast showing how men tinkered with the rock was a reminder that the end of the Cold War hasn't ended the cloak and dagger spying game between Russia and the West. Russia is now considered second only to China in terms of how aggressively it is seeking Western technological, commercial and military secrets.
US and British intelligence have also been recruiting Russian-speaking agents as Russia's economic and political power has increased, intelligence experts say.
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