Russian Security Agency Claims Jewish Activist Was Spy for Israel

Rumors of a possible Israeli spy ring in Siberia appear to have been put to rest — but not before a slew of reports that one Russian Jewish leader says hearkened back to the Soviet era.

Last week, the deputy head of the Federal Security Service branch in western Siberia, Sergei Savchenkov, said a spy ring had recently been uncovered after a Jewish tank factory worker admitted that he passed on information about a new Russian battle tank to an Israeli agency that has offices in the former Soviet Union.

According to the security sources, Alexander Sakov, 46, a well-known Jewish activist and head of the technical bureau at the Transmach tank manufacturing company, allegedly “had free access to the construction secrets” of the tank and transmitted them to the Nativ agency.

Nativ, a unit of the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office, used to collect clandestine information on political and economic organization in Russia. Now it only officially gathers information available through open sources.

A Russian security official claimed that the Israeli bureau has been involved in an “extremely perfidious” espionage operation. The official said security forces had unmasked an entire network.

“Sakov was the first Nativ agent to be uncovered by Russian security forces,” Tass quoted Savchenkov as saying.

The Federal Security Service, also known by its Russian abbreviation FSB, is a successor to the Soviet-era KGB.

Both Sakov and the Nativ agency denied the charges.

Sakov said in a telephone interview from his home in Omsk that since 1993, he has been providing monthly reports on anti-Semitism and the state of the Jewish community in Siberia to the Israeli Embassy in Moscow — a job for which he was paid from $60 to $120 a month.

Sakov said the FSB never accused him of spying. “I never mix my work at the factory with my Jewish activism.”

But he added that he had promised FSB officials in Omsk, which is located about 1,500 miles east of Moscow, to discontinue this work and had not submitted any reports to Israelis since April.

On Aug. 12, a spokeswoman for the FSB in Omsk, where Sakov lives and where the charges were made, said the agency had failed to substantiate the charges against either Nativ or Sakov, the editor of Shalom, a Jewish newspaper published in Omsk.

Mikhail Chlenov, president of the Russian Va’ad, the oldest Jewish umbrella organization in the country, said the charges brought against Sakov were part of a new campaign launched by the FSB that could be aimed at discrediting local Jewish leadership as informers and agents of the Israeli secret service.

“This can be an attempt to compromise Jewish activists in the eyes of Russian Jews” so that people would try to avoid contact with Israelis working in Russia, said Chlenov.

Meanwhile, two articles have appeared in the Moscow press during the past few weeks quoting FSB officials accusing Nativ of operating an Israeli espionage center in Russia.

Both articles have been spiced with anti-Semitism saying, among other things, that “Russophobia” and “extreme Jewish chauvinism” have always been characteristic of Nativ officials.

It is clear, one Jewish activist in Moscow said, that such charges would not have surfaced in the press unless they had been directly ordered by Russian security officials.

Meanwhile, a branch of the FSB has been established that is in charge of countering Israeli intelligence operations in Russia.

“I fear that security service of the new Russia might be reviving its `Jewish department’ of the past,” said Chlenov.

Chlenov was referring to the 5th Directorate, the infamous branch of the Soviet KGB, that persecuted underground Jewish activists from the late 1960s until 1988.