U.S. STUDENT SAYS RUSSIA TRIED TO RECRUIT HIM

MOSCOW, May 4 — An American student imprisoned on marijuana charges in a
southwest Russian city asserted in a handwritten note last month that
Russian officials set up his arrest in January, then asked him to conduct
unspecified work for them.

The note, written by John Tobin, 24, states that Mr. Tobin rejected the
proposal for work and added that he expected to remain in jail for some
additional time as a result.

The message was secretly taken from his cell in Voronezh and delivered in
March to his home in Connecticut, his father, John Tobin Sr., said in a
telephone interview today.

Mr. Tobin said he was making a portion of the note public because the
alternative — an enforced silence as the younger Mr. Tobin's case wound
through a Voronezh court — had failed to win his son's freedom or even a
reduced punishment.

"We thought if we minimized things, if we kept this off the radar screen,
so to speak, that perhaps they would treat him like they treat their own
students: at the worst, fine him and send him home," the father said.
"We're dealing with an insignificant amount of marijuana."

He called his son's arrest and conviction "a dirty little setup" on the
part of Russian officials, and said his son might be guilty only "of
picking up a matchbox of unknown content."

John Tobin Jr. was sentenced last month to 37 months in a prison colony for
possessing and distributing marijuana. A third charge, on which he could
have drawn up to 15 years in prison, operating a drug den, was dropped.

His lawyer plans to appeal the sentence on the ground that it is out of
proportion to the offense.

The elder Mr. Tobin said access to his son had been limited. He did not say
how he had obtained the message, which he said was addressed to a
girlfriend in the United States and generally described the conditions of
his imprisonment.

According to Mr. Tobin Sr., the note states: "So what happened? Well, the
local authorities constructed a nice little setup that I fell for hook,
line and sinker. So what now? I've rejected their offer to work for the
local man, so I might sit here for a while."

The elder Mr. Tobin quoted his son as writing that he had been "beating
myself up so long over this that my head hurts."

The note and its recounting of a proposition from officials is but the
latest turn in a case that seemed routine but has grown ever stranger.

Mr. Tobin was a Fulbright scholar studying changes in Russian political
attitudes at Voronezh State University, an institution popular with foreign
students, when he was arrested on Jan. 26 after the police said they had
found marijuana in his clothes.

The arrest went all but unnoticed for weeks. But it blossomed onto Russian
television and newspaper front pages in late February when Voronezh
officials of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., Russia's domestic
security agency, charged that he was actually in training to become an
American spy.

That conclusion apparently stemmed from Mr. Tobin's military record. A
member of a military intelligence unit in the Army Reserve, he studied
Russian at a Defense Department school and was trained in interrogation at
an Arizona military intelligence institute.

The State Department took the unusual step of denying that Mr. Tobin was a
spy. The F.S.B. later said it had no interest in Mr. Tobin because he had
not committed any espionage-related offenses, although it did not retract
the allegation that he was preparing for espionage.

The case has remained in the Russian public eye anyway, to the point where
youngsters demonstrated outside the Voronezh courtroom where he was
sentenced last month, carrying placards reading "No to American Drugs."

Reports of the amount of marijuana that the police say they found in their
investigation of Mr. Tobin have ranged as high as two ounces, but a Web
site devoted to Mr. Tobin's case — www.geocities.com/freejacktobin — states
that the amount he was sentenced for possessing was 0.47 grams, or about a
sixtieth of an ounce.