Ten convicted Russian sleeper agents in US custody and four men accused by Moscow of spying for the West changed hands yesterday
Ten convicted Russian sleeper agents in US custody and four men accused by Moscow of spying for the West changed hands yesterdayIn a seeming flashback to the cold war, Russian and American officials traded prisoners in bright sunlight on the tarmac of a Vienna airport on Friday, bringing to a quick end an episode that had threatened to disrupt relations between the two countries.
ExchangePlanes carrying 10 convicted Russian sleeper agents and four men accused by Moscow of spying for the West swooped into Vienna, once a hub of clandestine East-West manoeuvering, and the men and women were transferred, according to an American official.
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| A Russian plane takes off next to a Vision Airlines plane at Vienna airport yesterday with 10 men and women who worked as Russian spies in the US on board |
The planes soon took off again, presumably heading back to Russia and the United States in a coda fitting of an espionage novel.
The swap was among the biggest since the Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky who as Natan Sharansky became a political figure in Israel was released along with eight imprisoned spies in a classic cold war exchange in Berlin in 1986.
The swift conclusion to the case just 11 days after the arrest of the Russian agents evoked memories of that time, but it also underscored the new-era relationship between Washington and Moscow.
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The 10 sleeper agents had pleaded guilty to conspiracy before a federal judge in Manhattan after revealing their true identities. All 10 were sentenced to time served and ordered to be deported.
Within hours of the New York court hearing, the Kremlin announced that President Dmitri A Medvedev had signed pardons for the four men Russia considered spies after each of them signed statements admitting guilt.
Convicted in Russia
The Kremlin identified them as Igor V Sutyagin, an arms control researcher held for 11 years; Sergei Skripal, a colonel in Russia's military intelligence service sentenced in 2006 to 13 years for spying for Britain; Zaporozhsky, a former agent with Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service who has served seven years of an 18-year sentence; and Gennadi Vasilenko, a former KGB Major who was arrested in 1998 for contacts with a CIA officer but eventually released only to be arrested again in 2005, and later convicted on illegal weapons charges.
Yelena P Lebedeva-Romanova, a lawyer for Skripal (59), said she was very pleased that he had received an amnesty, in part, because he suffers from diabetes and she worried about the effects of prison camp life on his health.
KGB in numbers1954The year in which the KGB or the Komitet gosudarstvennoy bezopasnosti, the premier external intelligence agency of the USSR was founded
30 yrsTerm of jail sentence to infamous KGB spy Willie Fisher by a US court in 1957
1971Year in which KGB spy Willie Fisher died in Russia
