KAZAKH KNB FINGERS TURKEY AND IRAN.

Kazakhstan’s Committee for National Security (KNB) has let a few cats out of the bag of the obscure espionage affair involving a KNB major-general (see the Monitor, January 27). Without disclosing his name, the agency says that the officer was a veteran of the Kazakhstan SSR’s KGB, who turned spy for Turkey and Iran. He had been posted successively in those two countries as a diplomat. From 1995 on he allegedly passed information to Turkish and Iranian intelligence services, maintaining contact with his foreign handlers by a special telephone line from inside KNB’s Almaty headquarters. According to the agency’s account, the mole transmitted data on Kazakhstan’s politics, economy, military and foreign policies even after his official retirement from the agency. He has been handed over to a military court (Xinhua, February 1).

The KNB’s account contradicts the “Nezavisimaya gazeta” allegation that the general had spied for an unnamed Western power. The influential Moscow daily has built a case that President Nursultan Nazarbaev ordered the arrest and exposure of the spy in retaliation to Western criticism of how Nazarbaev is purported to have staged his reelection as president (Nezavisimaya gazeta, January 28). The newspaper, supposedly controlled by Boris Berezovsky, frequently snipes at CIS countries whose interests Berezovsky is supposed to represent as CIS Executive Secretary.

TAJIK LEADERS CONFER ON SECURITY SITUATION.