Eurasian Secret Services Daily Review

REVIEW TOPICS:
Special meeting of Polish bishops after Archbishop Wielgus affair
In Krakow, Poland, a book will identify priests, whose name were found in Communist secret police files
CIA secret document publicized crimes by Croatian paramilitaries’ leader
Estonia’s security police detained high-ranking police officer
Businessman linked to poisoned Litvinenko out of hospital-agency, treated for radiation
New Vice Chairmen of Security Service of Ukraine appointed
Castling in Tajikistan: Security Minister appointed from oligarkh’s pitch
Russian spy sentenced to 12 years of imprisonment in Azerbaijan
FSB of Udmurtiya personnel changed into new black uniforms
Lawyers of the Israeli daily Haaretz have found “Russian spy”

Special meeting of Polish bishops after Archbishop Wielgus affair
Poland’s Catholic bishops are set to gather for a special meeting to examine the situation created by the resignation of the archbishop of Warsaw. Following Archbishop’s Stanislaw Wielgus accusation of collaborating with the secret services of the old Communist regime, for many worrysome is the “political” use of what Holy See Press Office Director Fr. Federico Lombardi calls an “enormous amount of material” that was “produced by officials of an oppressive and blackmailing regime,” Spero News reports.
The Church seems to be under attack from a “strange alliance” of nationalists and former Communists which seems bent to weaken the Church’s historic authority without examining what officials and leaders of the former communist regime did, the agency notes.
Weekly magazine Wprost has attacked Mgr Jerzy Dabrowski, who worked in the secretariats of cardinals Wyszynski and Glemp, and who died in 1991 in a car accident whose circumstances have now raised questions. Between 1963 and 1970, he is said to have reported to the secret services what Polish bishops discussed in their meetings.
Bishops and priests want to know what is in their secret service files. According to Fr Jozef Kloch, spokesman for the Polish Bishops’ Conference, the Church’s Historical Commission has received requests from bishops and priests for further research into the documents that concern them since the Communist regime had most clergymen under close surveillance. Only a few dioceses have set up their own historical commission and are currently equipped to conduct an investigation, Spero News marks. Many people are concerned that since March 2006, secret police files held at the Institute of National Remembrance, hitherto accessible only to scholars, are now also available to journalists.
Poland’s press is speculating that Mgr Jozef Kowalczyk, the papal nuncio in Poland since 1989, will pay the price for not fully informing the Holy See.

In Krakow, Poland, a book will identify priests, whose name were found in Communist secret police files 

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Isakowicz-Zaleski (c)

Polish churchman, Rev. Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, 50, is preparing to publish a book that will identify 39 priests whose names he found in Krakow’s secret police files, three of whom are now bishops in the Polish church, online paper The Ledger writes, referring to a report published by The New York Times.
Most researchers who have delved into the archives of the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa, or Security Service, estimate that thousands of the country’s priests, monks and nuns at the time — as many as 15 percent of the total, according to Poland’s current primate and archbishop of Warsaw, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, — collaborated with the secret police to some degree. The church argues that the public disclosure of secret service files on clergy members could do the church harm because many of the documents are false or misleading.
Yesterday the Dziennik newspaper reprinted excerpts from a secret 1978 police document concerning a dozen high-ranking church officials — at least one of whom was a bishop at the time — indicating that the secret police tried unsuccessfully to influence the appointment of a new primate of Poland, the highest position in the Polish church. The document gave only code names, but the newspaper promised to disclose those identities soon.
Last January, Zaleski suggested that the church authorities engage in the process of vetting people for past Communist collaboration. It started a storm among the church authorities in Krakow and he decided to undertake the project alone and promised to publish his findings.
The church, meanwhile, publicly acknowledged that some of its clergy members had collaborated and issued an apology for their sins in March. It called on priests, monks and nuns who had collaborated with the secret services to confess — to the church if not publicly. Seven of the country’s 41 Roman Catholic dioceses have since set up commissions to help priests review their files., but none of the commissions has issued a report on its findings, The Ledger marks.
When Father Zaleski decided to begin publishing disclosures in May, Cardinal Dziwisz issued an order prohibiting any member of the clergy from delving into Krakow’s secret police archives without his authorization. But in June, the archbishop agreed to let him proceed on the condition that Father Zaleski seek comment from the clergymen he intended to identify, The Ledger notes.
Zaleski found the 39 priests identified as “TWs,” short for tajny wspolpracownik, or secret collaborator. Of the 39, 22 answered his request for comment, the majority denying that they were collaborators, and 4 admitting that they were. One of those who he wrote to was the Rev. Janusz Bielanski, who resigned as rector of Wawel Cathedral in Krakow two days ago, citing the allegations. Only one of the four bishops responded, and he supplied Zaleski with documents that showed he had refused to cooperate with the secret police. But the three bishops who did not respond, along with the other priests, will be identified in his book, that goes to print in mid-February, the paper says.

CIA secret document publicized crimes by Croatian paramilitaries’ leader
Croatia Government avoided investigating charges against former leader of Croatian para-military formations, Tomislav Mercep, CIA document reads, according to Belgrade-based daily’s Blic online edition.
CIA lifted secrecy of the document in December last year and presented it in its Internet pages.
According to the document, in 1991 Mercep personally committed or ordered numerous crimes such as tortures murders and disappearance of thousands of Serbs in Croatia, Blic writes. The most serious charges refer to events in Pakrac and Pakrac Valley where he ordered mass liquidation of Serbs. ‘Croatian authorities have removed bodies from two mass graves near to the railway station in Pakrac so investigators believe that 1,700 bodies are being hidden in the third mass grave’, the document reads.
Mercep is also brought in connection with mass murders in Gospic. He is also mentioned in relation with killing of the Zec family (husband, wife and their daughter) in Zagreb, the Serbian-language paper adds.

Estonia’s security police detained high-ranking police officer 

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Â	Ilmaar OjasooÂ

The Security Police of Estonia (KaPo) detained today Ilmaar Ojasoo, Senior Commissioner of a Criminal Department of Rakvere branch of police, on suspicion in numerous abuses of service position and bribery, online edition of the daily Postimees reports.
The high-ranking official of the Ida prefecture of police has been detained for 48 hours, according to the news agency BNS. The Viru district Public Prosecutor on Extraordinary Cases, Antti Aitsen said that according to the Office of Public Prosecutor, the suspect had committed his crimes in 2006.
«The suspect has testified and is detained for 48 hours now. Considering all the circumstances of the case, I shall not petition for his capture under the guard», Aitsen told the BNS. The Public Prosecutor, however, had directed to court a petition for discharge of the suspect from the police service, Postimees adds.

Businessman linked to poisoned Litvinenko out of hospital-agency, treated for radiation
Andrei Lugovoy, a businessman and a former KGB bodyguard for the Kremlin elite, at the centre of a probe into the murder of Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) ex-agent Alexander Litvinenko, has left hospital where he was treated for suspected radiation poisoning, news agencies are reporting.
Lugovoy told The Associated Press yesterday he had been released from a Moscow hospital where he was reportedly being treated for radiation exposure. The businessman, who was questioned last month by Russian and British investigators, said he was out of the hospital and was just “resting,” but did not elaborate. He said he would make no further comment until Sunday. Lugovoy has declined to say whether he had been contaminated with polonium 210, the substance that led to Litvinenko’s death on November 23.
Interfax news agency cited unidentified medical sources as saying Lugovoy was discharged at the end of December from a Moscow hospital. An interlocutor of the agency told that Lugovoy’s health condition was “satisfactory”.
Lugovoy, who told the press last month he had nothing to do with Litvinenko’s murder, met Litvinenko in London on the day Litvinenko fell ill with radiation poisoning. A second Russian witness who met Litvinenko in London, Dmitry Kovtun, was treated at the same Moscow hospital.
A source close to the murder investigation told RIA Novosti news agency that medical tests on Lugovoy had still not been concluded. 

New Vice Chairmen of Security Service of Ukraine appointed

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Gennady Moskal	Â

Gennady Moskal is appointed a Vice Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU), news agency Interfax-Ukraine reports. It is announced by the decree of the President of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, publicised on an official site of the head of the Ukrainian state yesterday.
Moskal served as a Plenipotentiary of the President of Ukraine in the Crimea since May 2006. Before, since November 2005, he was the head of the Lugansk regional state administration. Earlier Moskal was a Deputy Minister of Interior of Ukraine, the chief of Criminal Militia, and prior to that he headed the state administration of the Zakarpatye area.
President Viktor Yushchenko appointed also Igor Konovalov a Vice Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine, according to daily Ukrainsky Noviny. A respective presidential decree 2/2007, dated January 9, was signed in Kiev, the paper notes. Igor Konovalov was dismissed from the post of the Chairman of Public Service of Special Communication and Protection of Information by the government of Ukraine on December 27, 2006. He was replaced by Yury Chebotarenko. At the end of December, 2006, President Yushchenko dismissed two Vice Chairmen of the SBU; these posts have been filled by Moskal and Konovalov.

Castling in Tajikistan: Security Minister appointed from oligarkh’s pitch 

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Â	Khayriddin AbdurakhimovÂ

Arianastorm.com, an independent Internet-edition of Tajikistan, has published a review of current political developments in the country, marking that after long military confrontation the social and political life in Tajikistan had relatively stabilized. Western media admits that Tajik President Emomali Rakhmonov does seem genuinely popular in Tajikistan, where many people welcome the relative stability since the end of a civil war in the 1990s that killed tens of thousands of people. This gives him a good chance to establish his personal dictatorship and to reshuffle the leadership of the republic according to the principles of regionalism and fidelity, not on competence of officials, the website comments.
Member of the Tajik parliament, Chairman of the Party of Islamic Revival of Tajikistan, Mukhiddin Kabiri, says today the executive authority of the country does not count with the parliament. In an interview to online news agency Asia-Plus, he has noted, that there is no responsibility of officials for unsuccessful managerial experiments. Now and then the Tajik state agencies and departments had been unified, then, on the contrary, disbanded.
Asia-Plus calls to give realistic estimation to the personnel castling „on an example of a replacement that had caused understanding in the beginning, then bewilderment, and then, deep disappointment“. In such a way the online paper describes castling in the Security Ministry of Tajikistan. At first, Tajik mass media distributed reports that the experineced Colonel-General Saidamir Zukhurov, former head of Tajikistan’s State Border Protection Committee and ex-Interior Minister, was appointed the head of the Security Ministry. Zukhurov was the Security Minister already between February 1997 and 1999, and between November 1992 and August 13, 1995. Hardly it was found out later, that because of serious intrigues behind the scenes, President Rakhmonov had to cancel the decree and to appoint of to this post Khayriddin Abdurakhimov, from a pitch of “the Grey Cardinal”, Tajik oligarkh, Khassan Sabduloyev. “Now our national oligarch can do everything he wants with the state property, not looking back at the Tajik security services, that are obliged to watch economic crimes”, Asia-Plus comments with certain share of irony.
Tajik political analyst Shokir Khakimov says “the new structure of the government practically “does not look younger” — the former ministers have been replaced by similar appointees of the old generation. Some people have been simply moved from one department to another”. At the same time President Rakhmonov understands that these rearrangements can displease not only oppositionists but also the population, expecting even of scanty shift aside of improvement of conditions of life.

Russian spy sentenced to 12 years of imprisonment in Azerbaijan
The military board of the Court on Grave Crimes of Azerbaijan has announced reserve officer Petr Mojalov guilty of espionage in favour of Russia and has sentenced him to 12 years of imprisonment, news agency Interfax reports. The condemned has not recognized his fault while the court found him guilty of all charges.
Petr Mojalov, born in 1961 in Baku, after the graduation in 1979 from a secondary vocational school, was called in the USSR Armed Forces. In 1986, he received military education in Leningrad. After the collapse of the USSR, Mojalov served in the army of Azerbaijan, in particular, in February 1992, he was attached to the Organizational and Mobilization Directorate of the Ministry of Defence of Azerbaijan. The same year Mojalov was appointed an assistant to the chief of a staff of one of military units in the Nakhichevan Autonomous Republic of Azerbaijan, and in 1998 he was transferred to the reserve in the rank of a captain of the Azerbaijan Armed Forces.
According to investigators, Mojalov was recruited by the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Russian Federation in 1997 and till 2002 for monetary compensation he collected and transferred to the Russian side information on the structure of the Azerbaijan Defence Ministry’s General Staff, structure and location of Azerbaijan army units, their technical characteristics, armament and equiment, and combat material, constituating state secret, Interfax writes. It was established during the operational investigative measures that Mojalov was recruited by Valery Lastovsky, an officer of the Russian Defense Ministry’s Main Intelligence Directorate, online paper Day.Az reported. He was paid $300–400 for every portion of such information. According to investigators, Mojalov collaborated with the Russian secret services under a nickname of Igor. Mojalov was arrested in October, 2006.

FSB of Udmurtiya personnel changed into new black uniforms
Staff employees of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Udmurtiya branch these days have received the new, bluish-black uniforms, online paper Susanin.udm.ru reports. Earlier the FSB servicemen managed the standard military uniform of olive colour that differs from others only by buttonholes, chevrons and colours of gleams on shoulder-straps, cap-bands and edgings on peak-caps.
The new uniform will try on themselves also the servicemen of the Foreign Intelligence Service, Federal Protection Service and also Services of Special Objects of Russia. The new colour shade is developed by the experts of material and technical support of the Russian security services. According to informal data, one complete set of officer’s unform will cost to the treasury of security services around 5,000 — 6,000 roubles.
The online site reminds that in imperial Russia the uniform of black colour ranked to elite and it was carried only by the noblemen who served in special officer divisions of the tsarist army.

Lawyers of daily Haaretz have found “Russian spy” 

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Arkady Gaydamak	Â

News agency Scoop reported that in the justificatory letter presented last week to the District court of Tel Aviv, lawyers of the daily Haaretz had hinted that the known Israeli businessman and billionaire Arkady Gaydamak is “a Russian agent”.
According to online paper NEWSru.co.il, in October 2006, Gaydamak submitted a claim against the newspaper, demanding indemnification at a rate of 45 million shekels for slander – after the daily paper published an article of the former leader of MERETS party, Yosi Sarid, describing Gaydamak’s personality.
“The business of Gaydamak’s life is a factory of death. He has acquired his huge capital on arms and diamonds trafficking in Angola”, Sarid wrote. He described Gaydamak as an international criminal who had received a diplomatic passport of Angola “as a token of recognition of his contribution to bloodshed there”.
Last week lawyers of the newspaper Haaretz, Mibi Mozer, Tamil Glik and Rinat Modiani presented a justificatory letter to the court. In the document they allege that Gaydamak’s capital had been acquired by means of doubtful weaponry transactions in Angola, breaking the embargo of the United Nations, imposed on sale of weapons to this country because of the civil war. At the end of the letter, the lawyers hinted that Gaydamak was a Russian agent, putting some questions as follows.
“How did it happen that the Soviet regime allowed a 17-year old teenager to leave in 1972 to Israel? How it turns out, that already soon, as an ostensibly new repatriate, he left for France and created there a company with the Soviet Union as its main client? How did it turn out that a teenager who was authorized to leave the USSR, that was not possible for other young people, got in contact in France with the USSR representatives and the son of President Mitterand? Hoe did a young man manage to conclude millions-worth transactions with the state that was waging war in Africa, having business ties with the Soviet Union? Who initiated it? Who financed it? Who adjusted the contacts?”
Asked to comment on the accusations, Gaydamak told NEWSru.co.il that his long-time business partner in Israel was Dani Yatom, the former head of the Mossad intelligence service. “He could check up all rumours about me and my alleged ties with the Russian secret services,” replied Gaydamak.