A Russian physicist working on the development of supercomputers at Eindhoven University of Technology (TUE) lost his job last year after being uncovered as a spy with connections to Russia’s secret service.
After receiving a warning from Dutch intelligence officers that postdoc Ivan Agafonov was spying for his home country, the university terminated his contract and the government revoked his visa.
The physicist was unmasked because a Russian diplomat with whom he had a monthly rendezvous at a cafe in Aachen - on the German side of the Dutch border - was under surveillance by the German security service.
The story came to light in the Dutch media on Tuesday, forcing the university to issue a short statement via its website, saying, “In July 2014, the General Intelligence and Security Service of the Netherlands informed TUE through an official report that this researcher maintained contact with Russian intelligence services. It was then published in the Staatscourant, the newspaper for official announcements from the Dutch government, that his residency permit was revoked.”
In response the TUE immediately suspended Agafonov and TUE terminated his contract. Agafonov is currently chief executive at a Moscow-based sports company named trilife.ru, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was not available for comment.
Before moving to Eindhoven in 2013, Agafonov was a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light for periods between 2009 and 2011, doing research on quantum physics and nanophotonics. He was also part of an EU-funded Marie Curie training programme, which aimed to create new generation of quantum information scientists (the European Commission was also contacted for comment).
The Dutch security service, AIVD, meanwhile has reported an uptick in Russian intelligence operations in the Netherlands. “In 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. Agents are also being deployed to purchase military and semi-military technology, in a deliberate attempt to flout export restrictions,” reads a passage in its 2014 annual report.
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