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Opposition activist Haydukow wanted to spy for CIA, official says

Opposition activist Andrey Haydukow attempted to contact the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and offer to pass sensitive information to the US spy agency, the Belarus version of Russia’s tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda reported with reference to Alyaksandr Sidarovich, first deputy prosecutor of the Vitsyebsk region.

In August 2012, Mr. Haydukow wrote a letter to the CIA, which was intercepted by the Committee for State Security (KGB). The agency replied to Mr. Haydukow’s letter, misleading him into believing that he had been contacted by the CIA, said Mr. Sidarovich.

According to Aleh Barysevich, a senior investigator with the KGB’s Vitsyebsk regional office, the agency spent three months playing a “counterintelligence game” with the man. “We had to understand whether he was indeed ready to commit a crime or these were just some unfulfilled adolescent fancies,” he was quoted as saying. “He pursued the specific goal of establishing cooperation [with the CIA] and acting in the interests of this secret service.”

The KGB accused Mr. Haydukow of having offered to infect computers at the Naftan oil refinery where he worked with spyware.

Mr. Haydukow even made a dead drop in Vitsyebsk to collect his payment from the CIA, the KGB officer said.

The activist became aware that his letter had never reached the CIA only days after his arrest in November 2012, said Mr. Barysevich.

On July 1, a judge of the Vitsyebsk Regional Court sentenced the 23-year-old Haydukow to one and a half years in prison, finding him guilty of attempting to “establish contacts with foreign intelligence agencies without signs of high treason,” an offense penalized under a recently adopted appendix to the Criminal Code’s Article 356.

Mr. Haydukow, a leader of an unregistered organization called the Union of Young Intellectuals, was initially charged with high treason, which carries penalties ranging from up to 15 years in prison to the death sentence.

The fifth-year student at the chemical engineering and technology department of Polatsk State University and fitter in charge of instrumentation at Naftan in Navapolatsk was arrested in Vitsyebsk on November 8, 2012.

KGB spokesman Alyaksandr Antanovich announced on November 13 that Mr. Haydukow had "gathered and passed political and economic information on the instructions of a foreign intelligence agency," and that he had been caught in the act of making a dead drop. //BelaPAN