UNITED NATIONS — A former Russian top spy says his agents helped the Russian government steal nearly $500 million from the U.N.’s oil-for-food program in Iraq before the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003.
Sergei Tretyakov, who defected to the United States in 2000 as a double agent, said he oversaw an operation that helped Hussein’s regime manipulate the price of Iraqi oil sold under the program — and allowed Russia to skim profits.
Tretyakov, former deputy head of intelligence at Russia’s U.N. mission from 1995 to 2000, names some names but sticks mainly to code names. Among the spies he said he recruited for Russia were a Canadian nuclear weapons expert who became a U.N. nuclear verification expert in Vienna; a senior Russian official in the oil-for-food program, and a former Soviet bloc ambassador. He described a Russian businessman who got hold of a nuclear bomb and kept it stored in a shed at his dacha outside Moscow.
Tretyakov, 51, had never spoken out about his spying before last week, when he granted his first media interviews to publicize a book published Thursday. Written by former Washington Post journalist Pete Earley, the book is “Comrade J.: The Untold Secrets of Russia’s Master Spy in America after the End of the Cold War.”
“It’s an international spy nest,” Tretyakov said of the United Nations during an interview with The Associated Press. “Inside the U.N., we were fishing for knowledgeable diplomats who could give us first of all anti-American information.”
Some of the people named or referenced by a code name in the book have denied Tretyakov’s claims. The Russian mission to the U.N. said Friday it had no immediate comment.
An 18-month investigation into the oil-for-food corruption culminated in an October 2005 report accusing more than 2,200 companies from about 40 countries of colluding with Hussein’s regime to bilk the humanitarian program in Iraq of $1.8 billion.
