Edmond Pope

Edmond Pope (Эдмонд Поуп) - is a retired American intelligence officer-turned-"businessman", convicted by a Russian court in 2000 for allegedly spying for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for buying-up and smuggling classified military equipment out of the country as scrap metal. Shortly in his prison term, Pope was pardoned by the newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin. Pope has always maintained his innocence and continues to assert that the Russian authorities used him as a scapegoat for their broken system.

In the same interview with Larry King, however, he spoke of a plot by unspecified people in the U.S., as part of which Pope was being slowly poisoned in the Lefortovo Prison. Pope asserted that this was done with the hopes that he would eventually have to be transferred to a hospital, abducted on his way and smuggled out of the country; he claims that his representatives stopped the plot.