MOSCOW, Jan 23: Russia’s intelligence service on Monday accused four British diplomats of involvement in a spy ring in which agents allegedly passed secrets through a high-tech communications system hidden in a hollowed-out rock in a Moscow park.

Allegations were also made that spies from the British embassy had financed NGOs in Russia.

The British government said it was ‘concerned’ by the report and denied any wrongdoing.

The accusations, including the use of the James Bond-like communications device, were first made in a documentary on state-run Rossiya television on Sunday.

“Four British diplomats are suspected,” a spokesman for the Federal Security Service (FSB) — successor to the KGB and previously headed by President Vladimir Putin – said.

In a twist worthy of the most elaborate espionage novel, Russian counter-intelligence claimed to have discovered an electronic communications point hidden in a rock left in a small park on the outskirts of Moscow.

The FSB said the stone was being used as a high-tech version of the spy’s traditional letter-box or dead drop in which agents can anonymously deliver or retrieve information.

“At first we thought this was a normal, typical secret drop-off point camouflaged under a stone. However, later when our specialists carried out their investigation, it became clear that the stone contained an electronic device,” an FSB official told Rossiya television.

The rock allegedly contained equipment able both to receive and transmit information, the official said. “This was absolutely new spy technology.”

Rossiya television said that throughout last autumn Russian informants would communicate by passing near the stone and transmitting from a pocket personal computer. Days later, a British diplomat would allegedly visit the stone and access the same system.

Grainy black and white footage showed men who are claimed to be from the British embassy approaching the rock, including one incident when the device seems to have malfunctioned.

In the footage, a man alleged to be Andrew Fleming, a British embassy archivist, approaches the stone from a variety of directions with a personal computer, as if unable to make the equipment work. Another man, allegedly a second secretary at the embassy named Marc Doe, is shown picking up the stone, which is the size of a loaf of bread, and taking it away.

The FSB says it has confiscated a second such fake rock and also arrested a Russian citizen who has confessed to spying for the British.

There was no immediate talk of any expulsions and FSB spokesman Sergei Ignatchenko told RIA Novosti news agency: “The question will be decided at a political level.”

The FSB alleged that the spying ring was linked to the financing of several Russian non-governmental organisations. “What the goal of that financing was is something now coming under close scrutiny,” Ignatchenko told Interfax news agency.

Charities and NGOs operating in Russia with foreign backing have come under growing pressure from the authorities amid accusations that they are covers for spies. A controversial new law has extended the authorities’ control over NGOs.

The Rossiya documentary claimed that one of the best known human rights advocacy groups in Russia, the Moscow Helsinki Group, had received a British government grant signed by a member of the alleged spy ring.

But Moscow Helsinki head Lyudmila Alekseyeva said this was a ‘provocation’ aimed at whipping up opposition to the work of NGOs, seen by liberal observers as one of the only spheres of Russian political and public life still not controlled by the Kremlin.—AFP