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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| Russia, US swap 14 spies in Cold War-style exchange |
| 2010-07-10 |
| The biggest spy swap since the end of the Cold War appeared to have taken place on Friday as Russian and US planes met in Vienna to exchange agents, defusing an espionage drama that threatened improving relations. Two planes involved in the swap, one Russian, one US, parked side by side on the tarmac at Vienna airport for around an hour and a half as vehicles shuttled between them. The Russian plane then took off, followed by the US plane. Local officials maintained a strict news blackout throughout. Moscow and Washington had earlier agreed to swap 10 Russian agents held in the United States for four Russians jailed in Russia on charges of spying for the West. The dramatic conclusion to the espionage scandal which has gripped America came after spymasters brokered the deal on the instructions of presidents keen not to derail a series of important diplomatic breakthroughs in Russia-US relations. In the first step of the carefully choreographed swap, the 10 Russian agents pleaded guilty on Thursday in a New York court to charges against them and were immediately deported. "In exchange, the Russian Federation has agreed to release four individuals who are incarcerated in Russia for alleged contact with Western intelligence agencies", it said. Nuclear weapons: The US and Russian legislatures are also considering ratification of a key treaty cutting nuclear weapons and Russian accession to the World Trade Organisation, things neither side wants to jeopardise. Russia's Foreign Ministry said in a statement that the spy swap "gives reason to expect that the course agreed on by the leaders of Russia and the US will be consistently implemented in practice and that attempts to knock the parties off this course will not succeed". Relatives of spies on both sides of the swap had waited anxiously in Russia -- all bar one of the 14 agents are Russian citizens -- for news of the swap. Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) declined all comment on details of the affair. Moscow has always prided itself on bringing trusted agents back home and Washington has agreed to swaps before, though rarely on this scale. The largest known Cold War spy swap was in 1985 when more than 20 spies were exchanged between East and West on the Glienicke Bridge in the then divided city of Berlin. Spymasters on both sides say that despite generally warmer relations, the two former Cold War foes still fund generous intelligence operations against each other. The current scandal broke when the United States said on June 28 it had uncovered a ring of suspected Russian secret agents who were using false identities to try to gather sensitive intelligence on the United States. FBI counter-intelligence agents explained that the Russians had communicated with Moscow by concealing invisible text messages in photographs posted on public internet sites and some had met Russian diplomats from the US mission in New York. A Kremlin source said Medvedev and Obama's warm relations had allowed the swap deal to be reached so swiftly. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #10 Georgia, Poland and Czech? Ukraine? Functionally already happened when dear President Obama decided not to sell them Patriot missiles, lex. Of course, Poland and the Czech Republic spent so much time bargaining with his predecessor (He Who Shall Not Be Named) that they ran out the clock -- their mistake. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2010-07-10 19:30 |
| #9 Gosh aint it a cowinkeedink that Medvedev and his entourage were just here? But Im sure they were here just to shoot the breeze, eat cheeseburgers, and opening twitter accounts. Yep umhum |
| Posted by: DepotGuy 2010-07-10 13:27 |
| #8 cover for whatever it was we had already given/promised the Russians I think this explains how Obama got into office. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2010-07-10 11:04 |
| #7 whatever it was we had already given/promised the Russians for our spies. Georgia, Poland and Czech? Ukraine? |
| Posted by: lex 2010-07-10 10:35 |
| #6 Yeah, Besoeker. Seems like we rolled up those 10 (seemingly) jr. league Russian spies as cover for whatever it was we had already given/promised the Russians for our spies. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2010-07-10 09:47 |
| #5 Call me skeptical, but this entire affair has gone down a bit too quickly for my liking. I smell something, not sure what it is however. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2010-07-10 06:35 |
| #4 More details: When Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, one of four Russians delivered to the West in this weekâs spy swap, landed at Dulles International Airport on Friday to join his family in the United States, it was only the latest unexpected twist in a classic story of espionage and deception. For several years in the 1990s, Mr. Zaporozhsky, a colonel in Russian intelligence who became deputy chief of the American Department, was secretly working for the C.I.A., one of the highest-ranking American moles in history, Russian prosecutors say. After surprising his colleagues by retiring suddenly in 1997, he moved with his wife and three children to the United States and went into business. But in 2001, confident that his C.I.A. link was unsuspected, Mr. Zaporozhsky was lured back to Moscow by his former colleagues for what they promised would be a festive K.G.B. anniversary party. He was arrested at the airport, convicted of espionage and sentenced to 18 years in prison. On Friday, Mr. Zaporozhsky was flown to Vienna and then to the Washington area for the 10-for-4 spy exchange that promises to bring to a swift conclusion the saga of the Russian spy ring exposed by the F.B.I. early last week. His Moscow lawyer, Maria A. Veselova, said Friday that she âdid not find any proof of his guiltâ in her review. But circumstantial evidence suggests that he may well have provided valuable information to the United States and was well rewarded for doing so. One account by a Russian security official published in January in the newspaper Nezavisimaya Gazeta claimed that Mr. Zaporozhsky, who it said was code-named The Scythian by his C.I.A. contacts, was given an estimated $2 million in house purchases and other benefits by the Americans. Another of the four, Sergei V. Skripal, also seems to fit the classic cold war model, though without quite the roller-coaster intrigue of the Zaporozhsky case. A retired colonel in Russiaâs military intelligence service, Mr. Skripal was convicted in 2006 of having passed classified information to British intelligence, MI6, for a decade, in return for $100,000 wired to a bank account in Spain. But there is at least a little post-Communist ambiguity surrounding the two other men in the swap. Gennadi Vasilenko, a former K.G.B. major, was arrested in 1998 for contacts with a C.I.A officer but soon released, only to be arrested again in 2005 and imprisoned not for spying, but for illegal trafficking in weapons and explosives. And Igor V. Sutyagin, working at a Moscow think tank, did contract research for a British company that may or may not have been a front for Western intelligence. He has maintained his innocence, and human rights activists have defended him. While all four men signed written confessions to espionage as a condition for their release â and then were immediately pardoned â some of the cases show how the definition of spying has grown murkier since relations have warmed between the United States and Russia. For an arms-control researcher like Mr. Sutyagin to supply information to a British company would have been unacceptable to the Kremlin in the 1970s. In more recent years, boundaries have not been so clear. But American officials demanded precisely these four Russians as soon as talks about a swap began and valued them enough to make the lopsided trade. That suggests indebtedness on the side of the United States, said David Wise, a Washington author and veteran chronicler of espionage. âWe obviously feel some obligation to them,â Mr. Wise said in an interview on Friday. âYou donât leave your men behind on the battlefield.â The American willingness to quickly release 10 Russian agents operating inside the United States, after huge expenditures of money and manpower on a decade of surveillance, would have been hard to imagine a few decades ago. The stakes for American security seem far lower today, said Steven Aftergood, who studies government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. âNow it seems more comical than anything else,â he said. But the case was never funny from the point of view of the 10 Russians who faced prison sentences here â and certainly not for the four Russians serving time in grim Russian prison camps. Yelena P. Lebedeva-Romanova, a lawyer for the 59-year-old Mr. Skripal, said his release was especially welcome because he had diabetes and she worried about his health in the prison camp in the central Russian republic of Mordovia, where he was serving his sentence. The relationship of Mr. Vasilenko, once a top-ranked Soviet volleyball player, with a particular C.I.A. officer, Jack Platt, has been well documented over the years. Mr. Platt has said in interviews that he tried repeatedly to recruit Mr. Vasilenko, who worked for the K.G.B. in Washington and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, but was rebuffed. But in 1988, the K.G.B. learned of the contacts between the men, and Mr. Vasilenko was arrested in Havana and imprisoned in Russia for about six months before the espionage case against him fell apart. Years later, Mr. Vasilenko and Mr. Platt, both retired from their intelligence agencies, went into the private security and investigation business together. But in 2005, when he was 64, Mr. Vasilenko, then providing security to a Moscow television channel, was rearrested and charged after a search of his home allegedly found pistols and TNT. He was convicted and remained imprisoned until his release for the exchange. According to Maryland property records, Mr. Zaporozhsky still owns the house on a cul-de-sac in Cockeysville, north of Baltimore, where he lived until 2001 with his wife, Galina, and their three children. No one answered a knock at the door on Friday morning, and one son, Pavel Zaporozhsky, declined to comment by telephone. Aleksandr Zaporozhsky might not want to risk another trip back to Russia. But he and the other three men who flew west on Friday are free to return when they wish, said Nikolai Kovalyov, a deputy in the State Duma and former director of the F.S.B., the successor to the domestic security operations of the K.G.B. âThere is no formal prohibition on this from the Russian side,â Mr. Kovalyov told RIA-Novosti on Friday. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2010-07-10 02:10 |
| #3 Phil_b, 3 were CIA operatives, the fourth is a bit of a whistleblower transferring info on Russian nuclear arms to Brits. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2010-07-10 01:43 |
| #2 I'm curious as to whether any or all of the 4 jailed in Russia were spies, or whether this was done to give real spies (yet to be discovered) the reassurance they would be swapped were they caught. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2010-07-10 01:25 |
| #1 Personally, I do feel lament for ANNA CHAPMAN - IMO she was just a Kid being USED-N-ABUSED, ETC. FOR AN AGENDUM. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2010-07-10 01:24 |