AMSTERDAM—A Russian computer scientist was fired from his job at a university in the Netherlands last year after Dutch intelligence officers warned he was spying for his home country. Ivan Agafonov, a postdoc at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) who was working on quantum computing, lost his work visa around the same time and left the Netherlands.
TUE confirmed the case in a statement today after Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant reported the story this morning. The statement said the university was informed in July 2014 that Agafonov “maintained contact with Russian intelligence services,” by the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD). AIVD didn’t tell TUE to fire Agafonov, says Barend Pelgrim, a university spokesman, and didn’t discuss his activities in detail. “Basically it just said he was doing things he shouldn’t do and was a danger to national security,” he says. The TUE board immediately suspended Agafonov and later terminated his contract, Pelgrim adds.
Agafonov, 27, was “a very prominent young scientist,” Pelgrim says. He was a fellow in an E.U.-funded Marie Curie Initial Training Network called Photonic Integrated Compound Quantum Encoding (PIQUE), with a project called “Integration of detectors with GaAs-based sources and circuits.” The researcher wrote in his LinkedIn profile that at TUE he was “responsible for conducting and organizing experiments, optimizing design of photonic structures, equipment procurement, scientific papers writing, [and holding] a journal club.” Agafonov’s supervisor at the department of applied physics, Andrea Fiore, declined to comment.
According to de Volkskrant, Dutch intelligence officers were tipped by their German counterparts, who had discovered that Agafonov had a monthly rendezvous with a Russian diplomat from Bonn, Germany. During these meetings—at a coffee shop in the German city of Aachen, a 75-minute drive from Eindhoven—Agafonov received money, the paper said. It’s not clear what kind of information Agafonov allegedly passed on and what its value would be to the Russian government. “That’s the question we’re asking ourselves as well,” Pelgrim says.
Agafonov did not respond to an emailed request for comment from ScienceInsider today. “I’m not a spy,” de Volkskrant quoted him as saying. He told the paper that the payments he received were for his apartment in Moscow, which he had rented to friends of the diplomat for €800 per month. According to his LinkedIn account, Agafonov is currently CEO at a Moscow-based sports company named trilife.ru.
AIVD’s 2014 annual report includes a reference to the case. It noted that “[i]n the past year, it has been established once again that the Russian intelligence services are running agents in the Netherlands with the aim of acquiring political and scientific information.” Russian spies, the report says, “are damaging our political, military, and economic positions and those of our allies.”
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