How a Few Grams of Pot Turned an American-Israeli Into a Geopolitical Pawn
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Version 0 of 1. JERUSALEM — Naama Issachar was boarding a connecting flight at the Moscow airport on her way home to Israel last April when the authorities found a few grams of marijuana in her luggage, an amount so small her lawyer predicted it would draw a slap on the wrist. But on Friday, when a Russian court sentenced her to seven and a half years in prison on drug possession and smuggling charges, it became clear that Ms. Issachar, an Israeli-American citizen, had become an unwitting player in a proposed international prisoner swap. According to Israeli officials and Ms. Issachar’s relatives, Moscow has linked her fate to that of a little-known Russian held in Israel while facing extradition to the United States on computer crime charges. The amount of marijuana said to have been in Ms. Issachar’s possession — 9.5 grams, or .33 ounces — is well within the legal limit for personal use in Israel. In Russia, possession of such an amount by a foreigner would normally result in up to a month’s detention, a fine and expulsion, her lawyer told her family. Ms. Issachar happened to be traveling through Moscow from India, where she had studied yoga, “to save $200 on the airfare,” her mother, Yaffa Issachar, said in a telephone interview from Moscow. But her daughter, who turned 26 in custody, has been swept up by the sort of geopolitical forces that have entangled others. In China, two Canadians were accused of espionage this year, days after Canada went ahead with extradition proceedings against a Chinese executive facing charges in the United States. In Iran, two Australian hikers were held for weeks in a case that has been unexplained but that came at a time of rising animosity between Tehran and the West. An Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the diplomatic sensitivities of Ms. Issachar’s case, said that Moscow was linking it with that of Alexei Burkov — a Russian who was arrested in 2015 at Ben Gurion Airport at the request of the American authorities — in an effort to exchange the two. The matter has been discussed by Israeli and Russian officials at the highest levels. But Israel has few options: Its Supreme Court has already approved Mr. Burkov’s extradition to the United States, Israel’s closest ally, and the legal process is in its final stages, awaiting only the signature of the Israeli justice minister. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, raised Ms. Issachar’s case with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia during a meeting in Sochi a month ago and in a telephone conversation this past week, according to a statement issued by Mr. Netanyahu’s office on Friday. The prime minister “requested a commuting of the sentence and an easing of the terms of Naama’s detention,” the statement added, a highly unusual intervention in a criminal case involving an Israeli citizen abroad. The statement effectively confirmed that a swap had been proposed — something that Mr. Netanyahu ruled out. “Judicial authorities in Israel have made it unequivocally clear that there is no possibility of preventing the extradition of Burkov,” Mr. Netanyahu’s office said. The Israeli Foreign Ministry denounced the sentence handed down to Ms. Issachar, calling it “disproportionate punishment for a young Israeli with no criminal record.” There has been little comment from Russian officials regarding a prisoner swap. The Russian Embassy in Israel told the RIA state news agency on Friday that it could not get involved in the justice system, saying only: “We don’t know of any initiatives. We are watching developments and keeping our finger on the pulse.” American officials have not commented on the case. For Ms. Issachar’s family, ominous signs emerged soon after her arrest in April. At her first hearing, the prosecutor refused to grant her home confinement despite guarantees from a senior rabbi in Moscow’s Jewish community that she would not flee, Yaffa Issachar said. Still, Ms. Issachar’s lawyer, Alexander Tayts, told her mother to go home, saying he would put Ms. Issachar on a plane home in a month’s time. “Then he called and said they’d changed the charge from possession for personal use to smuggling,” Yaffa Issachar said. “He said he did not know why and that this had not happened before.” The Israeli authorities did not initially tell her of any connection to Mr. Burkov’s case, she said, and American officials offered sympathy but no practical help. By the summer, though, Yaffa Issachar and her other daughter, Liad, began receiving WhatsApp messages from a man who said he was an Israel-based, Russian-speaking friend of Mr. Burkov. The messages, she said, made clear that Ms. Issachar’s fate was dependent on Mr. Burkov’s, and that his extradition to Russia, rather than the United States, would be her ticket back to Israel. Just a few days ago, the man, who identified himself as Konstantin Bekenshtein, wrote an email to Yaffa Issachar warning that her daughter would be sentenced to five to seven years in prison and that they should “join forces to end the nightmare of Naama and Alexei.” In the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, the man said that “lawyers will not help.” Yaffa Issachar said the family had ignored the messages at first. “It didn’t make sense. What’s the connection between Naama and a hacker wanted by the United States?” she said of Mr. Burkov. But now, she said, “It has all exploded.” Few details are known about the case against Mr. Burkov in the United States, or why the Russians would be eager to have him back on their turf. According to Russian-language news reports since his arrest, Mr. Burkov was wanted for financial cybercrimes and charges possibly connected to the hacking of bank codes. Soon after his arrest in December 2015, a Russian consular official in Israel said the Americans had accused Mr. Burkov, who was then 25, of “hacking into computer networks.” In Israel, the newspaper Haaretz reported this past week that Mr. Burkov had been indicted in Virginia in 2015 on four counts of fraud; a year later, charges of identity theft, money laundering and illegal access of a computer were added. He was accused of offering credit card information for over 150,000 accounts. Russian officials have described him in the past as an “average Russian citizen” facing “politicized and biased” justice in the United States and have described the case as an example of Russian diplomats’ going to bat for their people abroad. Ms. Issachar is now caught in a complex triangle. Unless Israel can work out a deal that is also acceptable to the United States, Mr. Netanyahu, who touts his good relations with Mr. Putin, may have to choose between him and his American allies. As an American, Ms. Issachar also poses a dilemma for the United States, which may have to choose between her and Mr. Burkov. Born in New Jersey, Ms. Issachar moved with her family to Israel as a teenager because she wanted to go to an Israeli high school in preparation for performing military service in a combat unit. She is now being held in a prison about 50 miles outside Moscow and is not allowed phone calls, her mother said. The distance has isolated her from the Jewish community in Moscow. Her recent court hearings took place on the Jewish holy days of New Year and Yom Kippur, meaning that the rabbi and other community members could not attend. Natan Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident and a former Israeli cabinet minister who has monitored the case, called the legal proceedings against Ms. Issachar a “farce” and described her as a “hostage” for ransom. “It is a very dangerous precedent,” he said in an interview, “because many Israelis have American citizenship.” |