Lukes Publishes Article on American Charged with Espionage
Igor Lukes, Professor of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published a recent article on Paul Whelan, a United States citizen arrested in Russia and charged with espionage.
The article, entitled “The Curious Case of Paul N. Whelan,” was published on January 11, 2019 in The New Presence.
From the text of the article:
At the end of December 2018 Russian authorities announced the arrest of Paul Whelan. He had received a USB flash drive from a Russian man who came to his hotel room in Moscow. Minutes later Mr. Whelan was arrested, charged with espionage, and taken to Lefortovo prison. If convicted, he would face 10 to 20 years in prison.
Mr. Whelan, 48, is not an accredited diplomat. He is Canadian by birth, and also a citizen of the United States, Great Britain, and Ireland. He was a staff sergeant in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserve but left with a “Bad Conduct Discharge,” having been court-martialed for larceny on the grounds that he had attempted to misappropriate more than $10,000 and was guilty of writing bad checks. It was subsequently reported that Mr. Whelan, prior to his current trip, had been to Russia several times and was a passionate collector of Russian souvenirs. His family claims he had gone to Moscow to attend a wedding of an American friend who was getting married to a Russian citizen. His most recent job in the United States has been described as providing security for the facilities of an automotive components’ supplier.
How likely is it that Paul Whelan is an American spy? It is very unlikely. The Russian authorities have so far failed to support the charge of spying with any proof. This is strange because when the Soviet KGB or the Russian FSB arrested US citizens in the past and charged them with espionage, it provided evidence to display! Let me offer two examples. In July 1977 KGB agents arrested Martha Peterson, an accredited US diplomat and an undercover CIA officer, as she was about to load a dead drop for an agent code-named TRIGON in a pillar on the Krasnoluzhsky rail bridge that crosses the river in the vicinity of the famous Novodevichy cemetery. The KGB carefully photographed the arrest, and even the rough and demeaning search of her person. Then they took her to Lubyanka, woke up the deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy, and placed before him all the espionage paraphernalia the KGB found on her body and in her bag. This included the package she had planned to leave in the dead drop and her communication equipment. There was little anyone could say; the evidence was clear. Within a few hours an embassy car drove Peterson to the airport, where she boarded the first flight out of the country.
Igor Lukes writes primarily about Central Europe. His publications deal with the interwar period, the Cold War, and contemporary developments in East Central Europe and Russia. His work has won the support of various other institutions, including Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, the Woodrow Wilson Center, IREX, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1997 Lukes won the Metcalf Award for Excellence in Teaching at Boston University.