US reverses on meeting aid worker with KGB ties

The decision announced Tuesday was a reversal. Earlier, the department had canceled a meeting scheduled for last week with South Ossetian activist Lira Tskhovrebova, who came to the United States to draw American attention to the war last August over the breakaway region. She has urged the U.S. to place conditions on foreign aid to Georgia, which is a U.S. ally.

The high stakes of her trip have been magnified as Georgia and Russia compete for high ground in international opinion about who is to blame for the war that left hundreds of civilians dead.

State Department spokesman Robert Wood confirmed the meeting with Tskhovrebova and others. But he did not say when it would occur nor which U.S. officials would participate. Last week, a deputy assistant secretary of state, Matthew Bryza, canceled a meeting between his staff and Tskhovrebova on grounds that he doubted her independence.

Tskhovrebova has acknowledged to The Associated Press that she routinely speaks and meets with Vasily Guliev, whom Georgia identified as deputy director for counterintelligence for the South Ossetian security agency still known by the Soviet-era acronym KGB. Georgian intelligence gave the AP secretly recorded conversations in which Tskhovrebova appears to discuss assignments, money and information with Guliev.

Tskhovrebova has denied working for the KGB and maintains that the recordings reflect innocent conversations with a family friend.

"He had never demanded any kind of information from me," she said in a news conference Tuesday.

Tsckhovrebova, whose group is called the Association of Women of South Ossetia for Democracy and Human Rights, asserts she is independent of any government.

Georgian officials have called Tskhovrebova a spy and accused her of informing the KGB, and ultimately Russia's FSB intelligence service, about meetings with Western organizations, including the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

In a statement Monday, she called Georgia's accusations "vicious, false and predictable." She said Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili routinely calls his opponents spies. "It is a charge easily made and impossible to disprove," she said.

Reached by phone in Tblisi, Bryza said Tuesday he initially objected to the meeting with her but added, "We are not trying to blackball anyone here."

"I was worried about an exclusive meeting that confers some sort of special stature," said Bryza, after a meeting with Saakashvili. "My concern was always that we not do something exclusive with someone who may be operating in way that makes her seem not like a typical NGO (non-governmental organization)."

But the spokesman for Georgia's Interior Ministry, Shota Utiashvili, said Tuesday, "If the State Department wants to meet with FSB spies, that's their right to do so."

Mark Saylor, Tskovrebova's public relations representative, said at Tuesday's news conference that the original meeting was scheduled with the full delegation.

"I just wonder what changed," Tskhovrebova said.

Tskhovrebova and the delegation have been in Washington lobbying to draw American attention to alleged atrocities by Georgian troops against civilians in her breakaway region during the war with Russia. Tskhovrebova has met with congressional aides, including those of Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, chairman of a panel that oversees foreign aid. The U.S. government itself paid for an academic event on conflict resolution she plans to attend this week between her delegation and a group of Georgians.

She said her trip to Washington has been a success and had helped her overcome Soviet-era stereotypes of Americans.

"Now I will be able to come back with a new America in my heart," she said.

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Associated Press writers Matt Siegel in Tbilisi and Desmond Butler in Washington contributed to this report.