Grigory Yakimishen failed to reveal during jury selection that he was an undercover foreign intelligence officer in Poland in the 1990s, said defense lawyers Anna Stavitskaya and Boris Kuznetsov.
The Supreme Court in August upheld the decision of the Moscow City Court to sentence Sutyagin, a researcher at the USA and Canada Institute, to 15 years in prison for selling information on nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British company that the Federal Security Service claimed was a CIA cover.
Sutyagin, who is serving his time in a maximum-security prison in Udmurtia, maintained that he took his information from publicly available sources, and that he had no reason to believe the British company was linked to U.S. intelligence.
Human rights advocates called the sentence, the longest in Russia for spying since Soviet times, part of an FSB campaign to intimidate academics.
Yakimishen's name first surfaced as a part of the defense lawyers' appeal to the Supreme Court. The appeal said that Yakimishen came from the pool of jurors compiled for the Moscow District Military Court and therefore he should have been barred from participating in Sutyagin's trial. The lawyers are now preparing the last possible appeal, to the presidium of the Supreme Court, with the new information about Yakimishen, Kuznetsov said.
Yakimishen's intelligence background came to light in a Polish book titled, "Alganov, Yakimishen and Others. Behind the Scenes of Russian Intelligence," which is being translated into Russian, Kuznetsov said.
The defense will also add the complaint about Yakimishen to the case it submitted to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, he said.
Yakimishen could not immediately be reached for comment, but Moskovskiye Novosti reported Monday that he had refused to talk to the press.
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