'Anti-Soviet spy’ sent to labour camp

Press, 12 April 1978, Page 9

'Anti-Soviet spy’ sent to labour camp

i NZPA-Reuter Moscow A Leningrad man has been sent to a labour camp for 15 years after an unpublicised trial for passing State secrets to an Italian woman, Soviet authorities have disclosed. A Leningrad court official said that Leonid Lubman, aged 42, believed to be Jewish, was convicted of treason. The Soviet news agency Tass, giving the first account of the trial which ended on March 18, said that Lubman acted out of anti-Soviet motives to the detriment of the Soviet State. His reports for foreign intelligence contained classified information, recommendation on espionage, terror, and sabotage against the Soviet Union, and a call for "destroying the Soviet Union by every possible means,” it •said.

Lubman passed the papers on to an Italian woman named Gabrielli who was studying Russian at a Leningrad institute. But they were found during a Customs check at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow as she was leaving the Soviet Union lost August 11. Tass said that Gabrielli was sent to the Soviet Union by N.T.S., an anti Russian emigre organisation based in Western Europe Moscow has in the past accused N.T.S. of links with Western intelligence. The Italian Embassy said it had no record of any visitor to the Soviet Union of that name, suggesting that she was allowed to leave after the documents were confiscated. The last reported conviction for espionage was imore than three years ago when a Russian identified as V. G. Kalinin was found guilty of spying for the United States He L believed to have been executed. The Tass report on Lubman’s trial used language often applied to political dissidents, whom the Soviet news media regularly describe as renegades and slanderers. But dissidents in Moscow said they had not heard of the case before. A treason charge is also reported to have been levelled at the Jewish activist, Anatoly Shcharansky, a Moscow dissident arrested in March last year after being accused in the Soviet press of working for the United

States Central Intelligence Agency. Shcharansky, a member of i dissident Helsinki monitoring group, was later publicly lefended by President Jimmy Carter. It is not yet mown when he will face trial, A Swedish reporter has said that the mother of a Soviet defector attempted suicide by swallowing acid n a Moscow passport office on Monday after officials reused to accept her family’s ipplicat’on for an exit visa. Mrs Antonina Agapova, iged 68, whose family failed n an attempt to fly illegally to Sweden on April 1 to join her son, was later reported by hospital officials to be gravely ill with acid poisoning. Mrs Agapova, her daugh-ter-in-law, Lyudmila, aged 39, and her 13-year-old granddaughter, have been trying unsuccessfully for the past three years to rejoin Valentin Agapov, a Soviet merchant sailor who defected in Sweden in 1974. The defector’s wife, Mrs Lyudmila Agapova, stabbed herself with a bread knife in 1976 after an earlier exit application was refused. She told reporters last week that the family? had tried four times to reach a light plane which had flown in from Finland to take them to the West, Under Soviet law, attempts to flee abroad are treason, an offence which can be punished with the death penalty or up to 15 years in a labour camp.