Pubdate: Sun, 29 Jul 2001
Source: New York Times (NY)
Section: New York Times Magazine
Copyright: 2001 The New York Times Company
Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: Matthew Brzezinski
Note: Brzezinski is the author of "Casino Moscow," published this month by
The Free Press
JOHN TOBIN'S ROAD FROM MIDDLEBURY TO A RUSSIAN PRISON
John Tobin missed all the early warning signs: the unmarked white Lada
idling in the snow outside his second-story apartment; the odd sounds on
the telephone; the strange visit from the young Russian police
investigator, who introduced himself only as Sergei and claimed he simply
wanted to "hang out" with foreigners and listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
There were other ominous signals. Friends Tobin had made as an exchange
student at Voronezh State University kept getting hauled in for questioning
by the local branch of the Federal Security Service (F.S.B. in Russian),
which used to go by the more recognizable initials of K.G.B. After a few
shots of vodka, his older acquaintances and the parents of some of his
friends would invariably fix him with a suspicious stare and demand, "What
are you really doing in Russia?"
Tobin would smile the unfettered smile of a 23-year-old without a care in
the world and tell them about his Fulbright scholarship to study abroad.
Just short of a Rhodes, the Fulbright is one of the most coveted stipends
in academia and carries the added prestige of being administered by the
United States State Department. He had won it not just for his good grades
in college and a wicked backhand that inspired terror on the New England
high-school tennis championship circuit but most of all for his prodigious
language skills. And it was in his fluent Russian -- so faultless that taxi
drivers were duped into not charging him foreigner rates -- that Tobin,
whenever he felt particularly mischievous, would wink and say, "Ya shpion"
("I'm a spy").
Of course, he was only joking, his roommate says. It was easy sport to poke
fun at the residual paranoia in Voronezh, which during the Soviet era had
been a so-called closed city of military factories and fanatical
Communists, virtually off limits to outsiders. Though it is only 300 miles
south of Moscow, Voronezh seems stuck in a Leninesque time warp. The
governor still keeps an oil painting of the great revolutionary leader over
his desk, statues of him still dot the city's dreary streets and the
central square still triumphantly bears his name. Known as the "heart" of
the Red Belt, Voronezh is the spiritual center of dozens of
down-on-their-luck factory towns, nostalgic for the glorious days when they
proudly stocked the U.S.S.R.'s arsenals.
On Revolution Prospekt, Voronezh's pockmarked main drag, the region's
retrograde sentiments found expression in graffiti: "NATO = Sharks of
Imperialism," "Kikes Out of the Kremlin," "Respect Russia or Leave It." And
not all of Voronezh's residents confined their antisocial sentiments to
spray-painting walls. In 1998, when word got out that another exchange
student from Tobin's alma mater, Middlebury College in Vermont, was Jewish,
he was beaten up so many times that he fled for home halfway through the
semester.
Little of this registered on Tobin last September, when he hugged his
father goodbye and moved from Ridgefield, Conn., to Voronezh to research
the effects of the last decade on people's attitudes in Russia. In fact, he
chose Voronezh, John Tobin Sr. says, precisely because it was
representative of the real Russia, raw and unrefined, as opposed to Moscow,
with its McDonald's and Marriotts and IKEA and Audi showrooms. And Tobin,
by all accounts, liked living on the edge.
The trouble started on a bitter Thursday night in late January. Tobin --
Jack, as everyone calls him -- had just returned from Moscow, where he was
seeing his roommate off. The two had bunked together since junior year at
Middlebury and over the years had become proficient at covering each
other's backs. "It's as if the Russians were just waiting for me to leave,"
says the roommate, who does not want his identity disclosed because Russian
authorities have threatened to place his name on Interpol's wanted list.
In Voronezh, Tobin and his roommate, who was researching press freedoms in
Russia, shared a one-bedroom apartment on Peace Street, next to the busy
central train station. Their bachelor pad was cluttered and messy, with
overflowing ashtrays and closets crammed with empty vodka bottles that the
pair stacked up the way some fraternity boys build pyramids out of spent
beer cans. They rented the place from a police officer for $100 a month,
decorating it with an American flag and a dartboard that they used for
"world darts championships" during late-night drinking sessions with their
Russian friends. (Team U.S.A. always triumphed over Russia in these
spirited matches, probably because most of the locals had never played
darts before.)
Each took turns with cleaning chores and sleeping on the lumpy pull-out
couch, with only one exception to the strict rotation: "Whoever brought a
girl home automatically got the bedroom." Sometimes, Tobin's roommate says,
both would "get lucky," in which case privacy issues would arise.
But now that his roommate had gone home for the short winter break, Tobin
had the run of the place. And although his father had just called to remind
him to be especially careful since he was on his own, he set out for a
night on the town. Despite its nearly one million residents, Voronezh
offered very limited nocturnal diversion. Most people drank at home, but
Tobin's neighbors were starting to complain about all the parties with
music and doors slamming at 4 a.m. So he went to the Golden Tree, a nearby
pub that was popular with the young set, to meet one of his oldest Russian
friends, Sasha, who had studied foreign languages at the university.
Tobin was well known at the Tree, which offered vodka shots for eight
rubles -- or just over 25 cents -- and frothy steins of Baltika beer that
patrons downed at long, rough-hewn wooden tables. As one of the very few
foreigners in Voronezh, he was something of a star there. "Jack made
friends wherever he went," his father says. "He has one of those easygoing
personalities." His excellent Russian and dark good looks invariably
attracted crowds, gathering around to hear stories about the United States
or simply to gawk at the exotic import, who radiated self-confidence and
stood 6-foot-2 in his black boots and black jeans.
In short order that night, Tobin and Sasha charmed two pretty young women.
"They were thrilled to meet an American," Sasha later told Tobin's
roommate. It wasn't just looks and wit that made Tobin attractive to the
opposite sex. His $23,000 Fulbright bought a lot of rounds in a town where
the average monthly salary was $60 and students got by on a stipend of a
few hundred rubles. The girls, perhaps sensing Tobin's relative purchasing
power, suggested going to an upscale dance club and casino called Night
Flight, an expensive new hot spot that had just opened near Lenin Square.
Night Flight had just branched out from Moscow, where it had a reputation
for easy virtue, a place where the women wear revealing spandex and "charge
$200," according to the nightclub review in eXile, Moscow's
English-language alternative biweekly.
The club attracted a pretty rough crowd of hustlers and petty thugs,
gangsters and shady businessmen -- just about the only people in town who
could afford the entrance fee. The waitresses wore see-through blouses, and
the shadowy dance floor was splashed in black light. Tobin, Sasha and the
girls drank and danced for several hours. Sometime around 3 in the morning,
Tobin excused himself to visit the bathroom. When he didn't return, Sasha
checked outside, where he saw his American friend spread-eagled against the
hood of a Niva police jeep.
Initially, he didn't think anything of it. This kind of thing, apparently,
happened all the time to the American boys. "The police had once driven
Jack out of the city and robbed him," John Tobin Sr. says. Sasha, once, and
Tobin's roommate, twice, had been picked up by the police and thrown in the
town drunk tank to sober up. "The cops were nice to me," the roommate says.
"They asked how much police officers earn in the states and wanted to know
what happened to Monica Lewinsky." The roommate adds that Sasha was less
lucky. "They beat him up and took his money."
Outside Night Flight that evening, Tobin may not have been overly concerned
himself about being flung against the hood of a police Niva. As he had
recently told Art Pattison, the father of an old high-school friend, he
frequently was shaken down by crooked cops outside nightclubs in Voronezh.
Usually, a small bribe made the problem go away. This time, though, would
be different.
Just as Jack Tobin was about to find himself in the most serious trouble of
his young life, another scandal was brewing 5,000 miles away near
Washington. In the sleepy suburb of Vienna, Va., agents from the Federal
Bureau of Investigation were waiting in the bushes of a municipal park,
ready to spring a trap on one of their own.
Robert Hanssen, devout churchgoer, devoted family man and senior F.B.I.
counterintelligence agent, was caught red-handed as he dropped off
classified materials for his Russian handlers. While spying for Moscow over
a 15-year span, Hanssen tipped off the K.G.B. to some of the F.B.I.'s most
sensitive counterintelligence work and cost two American double agents in
Russia their lives. He also compromised various top-secret operations,
including a costly surveillance tunnel that the F.B.I. and the
ultrasecretive National Security Agency had dug under the Russian Embassy
compound in Washington.
Hanssen's was a betrayal at the "highest level," says a former head of the
N.S.A., Gen. William Odom, and in the ensuing fallout over Russia's
resurgent covert activities, the State Department ordered more than 50
Russian diplomats out of the country. The Kremlin retaliated with one of
the biggest mass expulsions of American diplomatic personnel since the end
of the cold war, and Russian intelligence set out to even the score by
catching an American spy of its own.
During his first night in custody, Tobin was no doubt unaware of the larger
game unfolding between Washington and Moscow. He would have had more
pressing worries at Voronezh police headquarters, where senior policemen,
F.S.B. officials and an interpreter just happened to be on duty at 3 a.m.
This high-level welcoming committee was incongruous given the relatively
minor infraction Tobin had been brought in on. The patrolman who frisked
him outside Night Flight claimed to have found a matchbox with some
marijuana -- barely enough to roll a slim joint -- in the pocket of Tobin's
leather jacket.
Tobin hotly denied any knowledge of the marijuana and reportedly said he
had absent-mindedly picked up the matchbox at Night Flight because his
lighter was running low on fuel. After more than 10 hours of questioning, a
team of top F.S.B. investigators armed with camcorders was dispatched to
his apartment. Footage from the search, broadcast later on state
television, showed triumphant officers opening a Russian-language textbook
to find a small cellophane bag filled with more marijuana.
"One of my Russian professors gave me that textbook," Tobin's roommate
says. "I can assure you there were no drugs in it. They planted the evidence."
Investigators also found Tobin's resume among his papers and computer
disks. In it they read that he was attached to the Army Reserve's 325th
Military Intelligence Battalion, based in Waterbury, Conn. He had joined
the reserves as a senior at Ridgefield High. He did so with an eye to
college expenses, which were going to be a little steep for his father, who
runs a successful but small house-painting business.
After completing basic training at Fort Jackson, S.C., Tobin, who had
earned top scores on his language aptitude tests, was sent to the elite
Defense Language Institute in Monterey, Calif. He spent a year there
studying Russian and moved on to an eight-week course in basic
interrogation at the Army's intelligence training facility in Fort
Huachuca, Ariz. After that, he went on to pursue his undergraduate degree
at Middlebury.
Russian investigators had read enough. On Feb. 27, a little over a week
after Hanssen's arrest in Washington, the Voronezh branch of the F.S.B.
breathlessly announced that it, too, had nabbed a nefarious spy -- John
Edward Tobin Jr.
For the F.S.B., it was a badly needed victory. The post-Communist era had
not been kind to the successor agency of the once-formidable Soviet secret
police. First, it bungled a hard-line coup against Gorbachev. Then, its
budget was slashed by a deeply mistrustful Boris Yeltsin. As a result, many
agents defected to capitalism, becoming bodyguards, hawking their talents
to the superrich oligarchs or founding lucrative businesses of their own
(one of those, a cellular communications company called VimpelCom, became
the first Russian company to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange). On
top of that, Western intelligence services had overrun Russia during the
chaotic and corrupt 1990's, when it seemed as if everything and everyone
was for sale.
But once Vladimir Putin, a proud career K.G.B. officer and a former head of
the F.S.B., moved into the Kremlin, the Russian secret police was back in
business. "There is no doubt that this institution was one of the least
reformed in terms of personnel and sense of mission," says Stephen
Sestanovich, one of President Clinton's ambassadors at large for the former
Soviet Union. "Putin's ascent has been seen as a carte blanche for these
guys to run wild."
This development has not been lost on Tobin's father, who like the parents
of other unfortunate young Americans in trouble abroad has been doing a
great deal of reading on the country that is holding his son captive.
"Jack's arrest would never have happened under Yeltsin," he says. "But
Russia is a different place under Putin."
Many in Washington who follow Russia for a living agree. "Putin has to let
the F.S.B. feel its oats," General Odom says, "because he's appointing so
many former K.G.B. officers to top government positions."
With them, old suspicions of the West are returning. In June, security
officials questioned another American, Elizabeth Sweet, a guest lecturer at
Omsk State University in western Siberia, for involvement in suspicious
"fact-gathering tasks." Her crime: asking students in her business
administration course to write case studies of local enterprises. An F.S.B.
spokeswoman, Natalia Grutsina, grumbled that "what students gather may be
inaccurate and bring damage to the local economy and to the country if
published abroad." The F.S.B. confiscated the offensive term papers.
In ultraconservative Voronezh, paranoia needed little prompting from
Moscow. To the local spooks, Tobin was, at the very least, a "spy in
training." Though Washington strongly denied the allegation, with some
officials going so far as to call it "ridiculous," Tobin's eight-week
interrogation training did raise some eyebrows.
"Hypothetically, but I doubt it, the Army could have sent Tobin out there
to 'become a Russian,' party with them, learn everything about that
generation, and told him they'd see about finding him work later," says one
former U.S intelligence officer. That theory appears to fit the Russians'
suspicions of Tobin. As a spokesman for the Voronezh F.S.B. quipped on
state television, "He wasn't sent here to learn how to bake."
The F.S.B.'s triumph, however, turned out to be short-lived. The only
"proof" of espionage they could produce were the tape recordings Tobin had
made of interviews with politicians for his Fulbright research. Flimsier
still were allegations that he had been spotted skulking around the town's
aging nuclear power plant, which just happened to be near a park where
young people hung out.
The day after making their dramatic disclosure, embarrassed F.S.B.
officials had to drop the espionage allegations against Tobin for lack of
evidence. "The local man was too anxious to earn his stripes," speculates a
retired C.I.A. case officer, Milton Bearden. "During the cold war, this
sort of thing happened all the time. The local yahoos would frequently
conduct amateurish operations that would drive Moscow Center nuts."
Unfortunately for Tobin, that was not the end of the story. Before his
formal arrest on Feb. 1 -- six days after he was picked up outside Night
Flight and spent the night in custody -- he managed to communicate with his
friends and Fulbright supervisor. One of the calls he made was to his
girlfriend, Celeste Jacobson, in New York City. He sounded scared and spoke
cryptically, as though he knew that others would be listening in on the
conversation. "It was obvious from the tone of his voice," she says, "that
it would turn into something much larger."
To his Fulbright administrator, Joseph McCormick, Tobin was less cryptic.
"I am writing you with some unpleasant news," he said in an e-mail message,
written in the few days between when he was first detained and when he was
formally arrested. "Early Friday morning I was detained by the local police
and some other people in civilian clothes, who then produced narcotics that
they claimed to have found on my person. . . . After long interrogations in
the police station, and many threats of jail and worse, I was approached by
the F.S.B. They told me that all this business would be closed if I agreed
to meet with them weekly, drink tea and talk to them about my military
service, other foreigners in Voronezh and so forth. They also told me I
could 'find things out' for them. I declined. . . . Since then I have been
under constant surveillance: followed and harassed. . . . They threatened
many nepriyatnosti, to put it lightly, if I refused to work with them,
(which I did)." Nepriyatnosti is loosely translated as "unpleasant
consequences."
What followed, Odom says, was a page straight out of the old Soviet
playbook. "They tried to turn him, and when he refused, they punished him."
While they could not nail Tobin for espionage, Russian criminal
investigators made good on the F.S.B.'s threats. "The American citizen," a
senior police investigator, Andrei Makarov, told the semiofficial Interfax
news agency in late March, "has been accused of an especially severe
crime." Tobin would now be brought to justice not for simple marijuana
possession but as the alleged mastermind of a ruthless "criminal gang" who
also ran a "drug den," charges that carried prison sentences of up to 15 years.
Tobin's April trial in normally sleepy Voronezh hovered somewhere between
an O.J. Simpson-style media circus and a Stalin-era show trial. The
defendant stood in a metal cage, which state television showed from many
different angles on the nightly news. As many as 30 of Tobin's friends and
acquaintances, including Sasha, were forced to testify against him, several
bearing witness to frequent marijuana use in his apartment. Outside the
provincial courthouse, youngsters marched with banners proclaiming "No to
American Drugs," while newspapers throughout Russia ran indignant
editorials about how the "Fulbright Stoner" was trying to poison innocent
Slavic youths.
The evidence against Tobin was plentiful, though somewhat contradictory.
Investigators produced results from a drug test that supposedly confirmed
Tobin had tested positive for marijuana. But his father claims that
observers from the American Consulate in Moscow disputed its validity.
Police officers swore on the stand that Tobin had tried to destroy evidence
during the search of his apartment. But a puzzled civilian observer who had
been brought in to witness the search denied that anything of the sort had
happened.
The case was also notable for public attacks of conscience on the part of
some officials involved. Another police investigator, Yelena Brykina,
admitted that she inflated the amount of drugs supposedly found on Tobin.
"I just pulled the weight out of the air," she confessed on the stand. Even
the lead prosecutor, Marina Galagan, announced at one point that she was
"ashamed to sit here and support" the charges against Tobin of trafficking
and running a criminal enterprise.
Indeed, the proceedings often veered into the farcical. The empty bottles
of vodka in Tobin's closet were dragged out as proof of his unsavory
character, a surprising tactic in a country where vodka consumption verges
on a national pastime. His elderly upstairs neighbor, Rimma Alexandrova,
was called to the stand to describe wild soirees, which, she complained,
typically lasted from 5 p.m. until 5 a.m. Asked if she could smell smoke
coming from the alleged drug den downstairs, Alexandrova responded blankly:
"Why? Was there a fire?"
There was nothing humorous, though, about the verdict rendered by the trial
judge, Tatyana Korchagina. Even with the more serious counts of narcotics
trafficking dismissed, Tobin was sentenced on April 27 to 37 months in a
Russian penal colony for possession of one-twentieth of an ounce of
marijuana, an amount so minuscule that it would rate only a misdemeanor in
most American states.
With a few exceptions, Washington initially treated Tobin as if he had the
plague. Drug charges against citizens abroad rarely galvanize the State
Department into action, and it was only after the more salient aspects of
Tobin's hurried e-mail message to his Fulbright coordinator emerged in
mid-May that officials started taking the case more seriously.
"Jack Tobin is not sitting in prison because he did or did not smoke
marijuana," says Representative James Maloney, a Connecticut Democrat who
is leading the effort on Capitol Hill to free his young constituent. "He's
there because he refused to spy on the United States."
Representative Maloney has made Tobin his cause celebre and has even
visited him at the detention center in Voronezh, where until recently the
Fulbright scholar shared a cramped cell with as many as four other inmates.
He warned Tobin to watch what he said in prison because one of his
cellmates might be an F.S.B. informant. "I can only imagine what the
conditions are like inside," he says of the jail, which resembles an
abandoned and crumbling factory complex surrounded by bars and barbed wire.
The toilet facilities for visitors, he added, consist of a hole in the
ground. "These, mind you, are the guest facilities."
Typhoid, tuberculosis and H.I.V. are endemic throughout Russia's pestilent
penal colonies. While Tobin seems to have been spared these more virulent
diseases so far, his father fears he is not receiving proper medical
treatment. "Jack looked so pale, so gaunt," John Tobin Sr. says, emotion
shaking his usually calm voice. "And I couldn't touch him or hold him. All
I could do was talk to him through a dirty glass."
For Tobin and his family, Washington's belated involvement in the case has
offered a measure of renewed hope. Over the past few months, Secretary of
State Colin Powell has raised the Tobin case with his Russian counterpart
three times in person and once on the telephone, while Russia's ambassador
in Washington has received polite but insistent letters from Capitol Hill
requesting Tobin's immediate release.
The campaign initially appeared to be paying off. In June, during a
scheduled appeal hearing, the Voronezh court reduced Tobin's sentence to
one year. More promisingly, prison officials have indicated that Tobin
would be eligible for parole this week, by which time he will have served
half his sentence -- as required by Russian parole law. An early release
would hinge on good behavior, and prison officials also seemed to be
sending positive signals. "So far," Alexander Babkin, a regional spokesman
for the Ministry of Interior, told Interfax in June, "he commits no
hooligan acts and does not violate the rules. The administration has no
complaints against the American."
Things finally seemed to be going Tobin's way -- until recently. "I didn't
want to get too excited or hopeful," says Celeste Jacobson, his girlfriend.
With good reason, as it would turn out. The Voronezh F.S.B. wasn't quite
finished with young Jack Tobin. In late June, security officials announced
a fresh batch of allegations, including one that he was an F.B.I. agent.
As proof, security officials trundled out a Russian scientist, one Dmitri
Kuznetsov, who spent five months in a Bridgeport, Conn., prison in 1997 and
1998 on larceny and felony charges. He claimed to have been questioned by
the F.B.I. while in custody, and now said he recognized one of his
interrogators as none other than Jack Tobin.
Never mind that, at the time, Tobin would have been in his sophomore year
at Middlebury, not yet old enough to legally buy beer and a full three
years short of the F.B.I.'s minimum hiring age. "There's no doubt about
it," a jubilant F.S.B. spokesman told Russian television, "the man's an
intelligence agent. This confirms that we were on the right track all along."
The F.S.B.'s relentlessness is becoming something of an embarrassment for
Russian diplomats in Washington. When the subject arises, they look down at
their shoes or up at the ceiling and mumble halfhearted defenses. "It's
clear they want this issue resolved and off the table," a State Department
official says.
The latest allegations have prompted some of the biggest names in
Washington, including Senators Joseph Lieberman, Hillary Rodham Clinton,
Jesse Helms and Joe Biden, to put their signatures on a nonpartisan
petition requesting that President Bush take up Tobin's case directly with
Putin. "Otherwise, he's not likely to get justice," Maloney says.
In tiny Ridgefield, where neighbors supportive of the large and popular
Tobin family have tied yellow ribbons to white picket fences and
storefronts all along Main Street, that is seen as perhaps the best news yet.
"People that I haven't spoken to in years come up to me on the street and
ask if Jack will now be coming home in August," John Tobin Sr. says. "I
tell them that when he gets home, we're going to have a big party, and
everyone is invited."
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