FSB Busts Sochi Spy Ring

SOCHI, Krasnodar Region — A businessman running an Internet cafe in Sochi has been exposed as the leader of a Georgian spy ring, the Federal Security Service said Tuesday. The suspect, identified as Ukrainian citizen Mamuka Maisuradze, has admitted to collecting information about the political situation in the region, including preparations for the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, the FSB said in a statement carried by Interfax. An FSB spokesman confirmed the statement but said he could not comment further because the information had not been spread by his agency's press office. He refused to elaborate. The Georgian government denied the accusation. Eka Tkeshelashvili, head of the country's Security Council, said the man had never served in Georgian intelligence. “I assume this is just a tit-for-tat arrest” after Georgia arrested four Russians in 2006 over spying allegations, she said, Bloomberg reported. The allegations come at the height of an unusually heated campaign for Sochi's mayoral election next Sunday. It was unclear whether the purported spy was in custody or whether any charges had been brought against him. Nor was it clear when Maisuradze was detected. The FSB statement said he had been declared persona non grata because his activities posed a real threat to Russia's defense capacities and security. "His testimony confirms that Georgia attempted to set up a regional intelligence network," an unidentified FSB official told Interfax. The statement said Maisuradze had provided the FSB with the names of Russian citizens who maintained contacts with Georgian intelligence. It also said Georgia's foreign intelligence service had helped Maisuradze obtain Ukrainian citizenship and set up private businesses in Sochi, including an Internet cafe, through which he communicated with his superiors. The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry had no comment on the claim, a spokeswoman said by telephone from Kiev. The FSB began watching the suspect in 2000 because of his alleged connections to leaders of separatist groups in Chechnya and other republics in the North Caucasus, Interfax reported. The FSB said that before arriving in Sochi in 2007, Maisuradze held executive posts in Georgian government agencies where he maintained contacts with Chechen separatists, including former Chechen President Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, who was killed in a car bombing in Qatar in 2004. Qatar convicted two Russian intelligence officers in the slaying. Meanwhile, Sochi's police chief warned that one of the six candidates running for mayor was planning to spread public unrest in the city. "Plans for a series of provocations are being worked out in one of the candidates' campaign headquarters," police chief Alexander Birillo said, RIA-Novosti reported. "People from other regions who have taken part in Dissenters' Marches and in the Orange Revolution are coming" to Sochi, he said. Birillo did not identify the candidate, but the race now amounts to a showdown between United Russia's candidate, acting Sochi Mayor Anatoly Pakhmonov, and outspoken Kremlin critic Boris Nemtsov. Ukraine's 2004 Orange Revolution swept President Viktor Yushchenko to power. Nemtsov was a vocal Russian supporter of the upheaval, and he served as an adviser to Yuschenko after he took office in early 2005. Russian-Ukrainian relations have been deeply troubled ever since, as have relations with Georgia, which fought a brief war with Russia over its separatist province of South Ossetia last summer. Earlier this month, the Georgian government paraded an activist of the pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi in Tbilisi, claiming that he had admitted to planning a provocation along the demarcation line with South Ossetia.