Russia labels British mine clearers as spies

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday November 03, 2002 08:56 by AMELIA

THE HALO TRUST, has been accused by Russian intellegence of spying and aiding Chechen fighters.

Russian intelligence accused British mine clearance charity the Halo Trust, of spying against Russia and aiding and abetting rebel fighters in Chechnya. It also alleged that several Halo Trust employees were undercover British intelligence agents or army officers.

In a detailed statement, the FSB domestic intelligence service charged that the Halo Trust had been working unauthorized in Chechnya since 1997 in league with the Chechen leader, President Aslan Maskhadov, and other Chechen warlords, training rebel combat engineers while pretending to be engaged in mine clearance operations.

The FSB named three British citizens working behind Chechen lines in the war zone and said the leader of a team of around 15 Halo Trust employees working in Chechnya last November was a career British military intelligence officer. He was named as Matthew Middlemis.

A senior aid official in Moscow confirmed that two other British citizens were named working for the Halo Trust.

The British Foreign Office said Thursday night that Halo Trust was well aware of its advice to agencies not to go to Chechnya. Other Whitehall officials said the charity had done extremely valuable work in Kosovo, Cambodia and elsewhere and had worked closely with the FO.

They described the Russian allegations as "speculation" and said they were seeking further information from Moscow. Whitehall sources said they were fairly confident there was nothing behind the Russian allegations which they conceded were "specific" but whose timing they described as "bizarre."

Halo Trust "came to the notice of Russian state security agencies in 1998 when British subjects Charlie Emms, Nicholas Nobbs and Zimbabwe citizen Thomas Dibb ... were reported to be engaged in spying and subversive activities against Russia in Chechnya," the FSB statement said.

The charity’s director, Guy Willoughby, a former Coldstream Guards officer based in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, flatly dismissed the Russian charges.

"We just completely deny this sort of allegation that we were in any way supporting mine laying or any form of terrorist activity. We were running a standard humanitarian mine-clearing organization and the Russian authorities knew about it," he said.

He said the agency had left Chechnya late last year and that of the four men named by the FSB, only one – Dibb – still worked for the organization. Middlemis had left four years ago.

He said the charity employed 150 Chechens, as its Website made clear. Some of them had been captured by the Russians. The charity worked in Chechnya between 1997 and 1999 when they surveyed the whole of Chechnya. It left of its own accord, said Willoughby.

Halo Trust teams were said to have entered Chechnya with the aid of rebel fighters via the high mountain passes of the Georgian border.

"Halo Trust is supposed to be engaged in humanitarian work, clearing mines," said the FSB spokesman, Alexander Zdanovich. "But the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In fact, this organization’s staff and its recruits – it trained more than 100 people – were trained not to clear mines, but mainly to lay minefields, to lay explosives on the roads used by federal [Russian] troops, as a result repeatedly exploding their charges on the roads, laying their bombs in the forests, killing people, servicemen and peaceful civilians."

But senior aid workers with long experience of the extremely dangerous conditions in Chechnya praised the Halo Trust’s professionalism and courage in conducting mine clearance operations that no one else would take on.

The FSB said the Russian authorities had arrested seven Chechens trained and employed by the Halo Trust

"Under cover of mine-clearing operations, they [the Halo Trust] organized the training of combat engineers and carried out full-scale topographic surveillance of Chechnya, fixing Chechen villages to the NATO frame of reference," the FSB said.

The Russians appear to have been following the charity’s activities for months, if not years, and aid workers in Moscow were at a loss to understand why the FSB unveiled its allegations now.