Finnish diplomat at loss to explain why East German Stasi opened file on him

Alpo Rusi, 58, a Finnish diplomat who says he was wrongly accused of spying for Stasi, the intelligence service of the former East Germany, is seeking damages in a court case that has opened in Helsinki. Alpo Rusi, who is an adviser to the president of the United Nations General Assembly now, is asking for 500,000 euros ($675,000) in damages from the Finnish state.
Helsinki District Court heard today that Finland’s Security Police (SUPO) had launched its preliminary investigation on Alpo Rusi on the basis of an account by Stasi officer and a large number of documents, including Finnish Foreign Ministry wins, sent to East Germany, news agency STT reports. The officer, Peter Keller, had told German officials that Stasi codename Pekka had a link to Rusi. SUPO had known before this that Pekka had handed dozens of documents to the German Democratic Republic.
In an interview to news agency AFP prior to the opening of the trial at the court, Rusi said he was a victim of Finnish Security Police ((SUPO) methods, which he called a “product of the culture of the Cold War and cooperation with the KGB.” Like many in Finland, he has called for SUPO to make public the Stasi files concerning Finland, which the United States Central Intelligence Agency handed over in the early 1990s.
Finnish police opened investigations in May 2002 against Rusi and his older brother Jukka, now deceased, based on information from the Finnish intelligence agency SUPO, which suspected them of passing information to Stasi agents. He was at a loss to explain why the Stasi had opened a file on him. Alpo Rusi said the Stasi had opened a file on him and his brother Jukka but while Jukka’s contained more than 100 documents his file was empty.
The preliminary investigation was closed in June 2003 as State Prosecutor Jarmo Rautakoski decided that there are no grounds to prosecute Rusi due to lack of evidence. While the Finnish justice system never found Rusi guilty, it never declared him innocent either.
Alpo Rusi vehemently denied the claims, while Jukka, a government information officer, partially admitted the allegations but was never charged before his death. In an interview to the AFP cited by The Peninsula, Rusi says he missed out on several job opportunities because of the spying allegations and hopes the court case will clear his name once and for all. He is represented in court by his lawyer Olli Santanen. Hearings are expected to continue this week, and a verdict is due in mid-September, agency says.
The lawyers for Ambassador Alpo Rusi say that the Finnish Security Police failed to do its job right. According to Rusi’s legal team, SUPO made mistakes either deliberately, or through serious carelessness. “The Security Police has, above all, failed to conduct its basic inquiries, and gone to war with guns blazing, so to speak, and did not investigate at all what the GDR intelligence material contained, or the significance of the cards in it”, daily Helsingin Sanomat cites Olli Santanen, one of Rusi’s legal team. Santanen refers to the infamous Rosenholz material, and to cards F16 and F22, as well as code XV/11/69. According to the legal team, there was a card for Rusi in the Stasi archive, but that it was not an operator card.
Rusi’s lawyers say that if Rusi had been an HVA contact of Stasi’s external espionage, he would have had a separate operation, and register opened in his name, Helsingin Sanomat writes. In their view, SUPO misinterpreted the cards, the paper adds.
In the its rebuttal the state said that suspicions against Rusi were based on statements by a Stasi officer, and on the large number of documents, Helsingin Sanomat reports. Before interviewing the Stasi officer, SUPO already knew that the code name “Pekka” had handed dozens of documents to East Germany. In the state’s view, justification for an investigation was clearly established on this basis, the paper concludes.