Journalism, the James Bond Way

The tools of journalism are few, but they are crucial: a good camera, a steno pad, an Alphanumerical Information Scrambler.


This last -- along with the Perekhod Portable Detector of Hidden Microphone Transmitters, the Pikhta-P Miniature Voice-Data-Leakage Service-Links Detector, and the Pulsar Miniature Audio Recording Devices Detector -- is a relatively new addition to the list.


But all of them are equally necessary in the dangerous, cloak-and-dagger business that Russian journalism has become, according to officials of the Union of Mass Media Workers.


Between the paper products and the dictaphones at Journalist, a shop on Smolenskaya Naberezhnaya, is a booth marked Spetstekhnika, which stocks everything journalists need to scramble, reroute, and otherwise protect their chief commodity: information.


Offered for sale at the store's Spy Accessories stall are devices manufactured by the "Soviet military-industrial complex" that have only recently become available "to simple Russians, and simple journalists," said Andrei Petrochinin, a vice chairman of the union, who helped to organize sales in cooperation with OPK, a Russian company that distributes security equipment.


For a cool 2,039,180 rubles, a faux car stereo actually allows the customer to monitor listening devices in six different locations. Bugs with a 200-meter range are hidden inside lighters, indelible markers and fountain pens, for the bargain price of 767,250 rubles. And what appears to be an ordinary dictaphone is actually the Perekhod (1,005,950 rubles), which crackles convincingly when it detects the bug of its owner's adversary.


Although the 30-model inventory at Journalist now consists exclusively of surveillance devices, the shop hopes to branch out to protections against violence.


According to Vladimir Ruga, another vice chairman of the union, the equipment is designed to protect information and, by inference, the journalists who have it.


That idea has taken on a more serious color since the killing last week of Dmitry Kholodov, a reporter for Moskovsky Komsomolets.


Said Ruga, "We basically want to help editors protect the valuable lives of their correspondents."


Ruga added that "not just journalists but all citizens have the right to protect themselves" against espionage.


This week marked the opening of the store's Spy Accessories section, which has been in the works for about two months, said Petrochinin, a former correspondent for Moskovsky Komsomolets.


Although he and Ruga had longstanding plans to open up shop, they said that they were prompted by the recent upswing in threats against journalists.


"These risks did not exist even last year," Petrochinin said. "We may not be able to avoid this unpleasantness, but we can at least try."


A listening device would not have saved Kholodov's life, Ruga said, but journalists would do well to consider security risks in every aspect of their work.


"For our colleagues, it has become necessary to pay more attention," he said. "We have to protect ourselves more."


Although journalists are their target buyers, Petrochinin said that he anticipates that customers for Spetstekhnika would include, in addition to reporters, "bankers and businessmen, and whoever else may find it necessary."