FULBRIGHT SCHOLAR FREED AFTER 6 MONTHS IN RUSSIAN JAIL

MOSCOW, Aug. 3 -- John E. Tobin Jr., the jailed American Fulbright
scholar, walked out of a southwest Russian prison today a free man,
paroled hours earlier on a minor marijuana conviction that briefly
threatened to blossom into an international espionage drama.

A district court in the small town of Rossosh, near the Ukrainian
border, ordered Mr. Tobin released this morning at the urging of
officials at the prison camp there, who described him as an exemplary
inmate. He had served roughly six months of a 37-month sentence --
later reduced to one year -- for possessing less than two-tenths of an
ounce of marijuana and sharing it with others. The police said they
found marijuana in his clothes and in his apartment after they seized
him outside a nightclub in Voronezh, 280 miles south of Moscow.

But drugs were a sideshow in Mr. Tobin's drama. His case made
headlines only after local officials of the Federal Security Service,
the domestic successor to the Soviet K.G.B., called a news conference
weeks after he was seized by the police on Jan. 26 to announce that
Mr. Tobin, who had been studying the evolution of Russian politics,
was in fact in training to become an American spy.

Mr. Tobin, 24, who had been attending Voronezh State University when
he was detained, did not speak to reporters today. The United States
Embassy here said he had asked that information about his
circumstances remain private.

But the Interfax news service reported that after his release, Mr.
Tobin went to Voronezh, where his personal effects were stored, and
that he would go to Moscow tonight.

Representative Jim Maloney, a Connecticut Democrat who pressed both
the Bush administration and the Kremlin on Mr. Tobin's behalf, said
Mr. Tobin would probably return by midweek to his home in Ridgefield,
Conn., where his parents and friends had waged an intense media and
political campaign for his release.

Why Mr. Tobin was seized, arrested and given a heavy prison term for a
minor drug offense -- and why he was abruptly set free -- is a matter of
speculation. Many political experts in Russia and the United States
have called the affair an instance of a resurgent suspicion of
foreigners in Russia, fanned by an intelligence establishment that
feels reinvigorated now that one of its own is the nation's president.
President Vladimir V. Putin was head of the Federal Security Service
before becoming prime minister in 1999.

The accusations against Mr. Tobin appear to have been based on his
military record. Before becoming a Fulbright scholar, he studied
Russian at the prestigious Defense Language Institute in Monterey,
Calif., and received training in interrogation at a Defense Department
intelligence institute in Fort Huachuca, Ariz.

He had enlisted in the Army reserve in high school, and had served in
the 325th Military Intelligence Battalion in Waterbury, Conn., near
his home.

"The Russian security services believe the American was apparently
carrying out work to familiarize himself with the country and language
before receiving his main assignment," a spokesman for the Voronezh
arm of the security service told Interfax at the time.

The State Department took the unusual step of denying the charge
outright. Mr. Tobin later stated, in a message made public by his
father, that he had been set up on the drug charges by the Federal
Security Service.

In an e-mail message to his Fulbright administrator shortly after he
was seized in January, Mr. Tobin wrote that the marijuana had been
planted by the police after they picked him up. That night, he said,
interrogators from the security service warned that he would suffer
the consequences if he did not agree to discuss his military training
and serve as an informant on foreigners in Voronezh. He said he had
refused.

Less than a week later, on Feb. 1, Mr. Tobin was formally arrested and
charged with possessing and sharing marijuana and operating a drug
den. The latter charge, which carries a 15- year sentence, was
dismissed in court. But Mr. Tobin was convicted on the other charges,
and his lawyers protested that the 37-month prison sentence was unduly
harsh for the offenses, which would have merited only a light fine in
an American court.

Mr. Tobin was never formally charged with espionage, and
counterintelligence officials in Moscow initially said the security
service had no interest in prosecuting him. But up to the final weeks
of his imprisonment, the agency held out the possibility that he might
face new charges, and at one point produced a Russian scientist who
claimed that Mr. Tobin had interrogated him when he served time in a
Bridgeport, Conn., jail in the late 1990's.

Mr. Tobin's troubles surfaced at a time when both foreigners and
Russian citizens who deal regularly with them have come under new
scrutiny by Russia's security organs. Several have been charged with
espionage, underscoring the renewed suspicion of Western intentions
that has snowballed here in recent years.

Several months earlier, a Moscow court convicted a retired American
naval intelligence officer, Edmund Pope, on espionage charges after he
purchased Russian military technology from Russian researchers. Mr.
Pope and the researchers insisted that the material was unclassified.
Russian experts in Siberia and in western Russia have also been
charged with treason after counterintelligence officers concluded that
research contracts they held with foreign companies involved the sale
of state secrets, a charge they deny.

Some experts have called Mr. Tobin's troubles a response to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation's arrest of Robert P. Hanssen, a
senior F.B.I. counterintelligence agent who had worked as a mole for
the Soviet Union and Russian intelligence since the mid-1980's.

Mr. Tobin, who had been studying changes in Russia's political climate
while in Voronezh, was strongly supported by Russian university
students, who were reported to have jammed the courtroom during his
trial in April.

Whatever his problems with the police, Mr. Tobin appears to have
impressed prison officials in Rossosh. His sentence was cut by two-
thirds after they noted that he had been a model prisoner, learning
woodworking, playing sports and attending the Russian Orthodox Church.

Among other projects, Mr. Tobin made frames for icons that were to be
installed in a church the prison is building.

The warden, Nikolai Kravchenko, was sufficiently impressed that he
told the NTV television network that he planned to keep in contact
with Mr. Tobin by e-mail, and that the two had discussed a joint
project to create a prison rehabilitation program.