- MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia
Wednesday accused the United States of trying to steal military secrets,
just weeks before President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart George
W. Bush are due to meet in Moscow.
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- The Interfax news agency quoted an official of the FSB
domestic security service as saying it had uncovered a U.S. spy ring.
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- CIA officials posing as U.S. diplomats had tried to recruit
an expert in a secret Defense Ministry plant before the FSB, the main successor
to the Soviet KGB, intervened, it said.
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- "The FSB has irrefutable evidence of the CIA's spying
activities in Russia," an FSB official was quoted as saying.
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- "The timely intervention of the Russian security
service stopped the U.S. plans at an early stage, taking control of their
action and preventing a serious threat to the security of the Russian Federation."
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- Officials at the U.S. embassy in Moscow and the CIA in
Washington declined to comment. The FSB was unavailable for comment.
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- Russia and the United States have improved ties since
the September 11 attacks against U.S. cities, when Putin was among the
first to offer his support. The Kremlin has since backed the U.S.-led war
on terrorism.
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- The FSB charges add to a growing list of woes likely
to crop up at the May 23-25 summit in Moscow and St. Petersburg, already
set to include bickering over U.S. poultry imports, a U.S.-funded radio
broadcast to Russia's separatist Chechnya region and nuclear disarmament.
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- The unnamed FSB official, speaking to Interfax, named
a junior diplomat in the U.S. embassy in Moscow as leading the operation,
adding the diplomat had already left Russia.
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- "The work was carried out by CIA officers, working
under the cover of American diplomats in Moscow and in one of the CIS states,"
the official said.
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- In March last year, 50 Russian diplomats were expelled
from the United States, prompting a tit-for-tat response from the Kremlin
in the worst spy scandal to shake Moscow and Washington since the Cold
War.
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