The only thing that was needed was “The Twist” or “Puff the Magic Dragon” playing in the background: the United States and Russia, in an event that would have been more in place in the 50s and the 60s than in 2010, have exchanged spy prisoners on a tarmac in Vienna.
Planes carrying 10 convicted Russian sleeper agents and 4 men accused by Moscow of spying for the West swooped into the Austrian capital, once a hub of clandestine East-West maneuvering, and the men and women were transferred, according to an American official. The planes soon took off again in a coda fitting of an espionage novel.
The first sign that the exchange — one of the biggest in over two decades — was under way came as an American Vision Airlines jet carrying the Russian agents deported from the United States touched down and taxied to park only a matter of yards from the Russian plane from Moscow’s Emergencies Ministry. For a while the only sound of movement was an unidentified emissary shuttling between the airplanes.
Then, more than an hour later, with little fanfare and no formal announcement from either side, the Russian-flagged plane took off into clear blue skies — presumably for Russia — closely followed by the American airplane. News reports on Friday morning said the American plane had landed at a British military base in central England.
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 1986. But that exchange took place in a wintry Berlin across the snow-dusted Glienicke Bridge in Berlin at a time when the Iron Curtain cut Europe into rival ideological camps and this city provided one of few avowedly neutral havens.
The swift conclusion to the case just 12 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.
What does it mean?
Daniel McGroarty, principal of Carmot Strategic Group, an issues management firm in Washington, D.C., served in senior positions in the White House and at the Department of Defense, writing on RealClearWorld notes that although the press has covered this as a kind of “weird news” story there are serious implications at play:
As for why Russia went through the time, trouble and considerable expense, most pundits seem to subscribe to a theory of espionage-by-inertia: Russia’s Foreign Intel Service wound them up and sent them here because, well, that’s what spies do – with the Russian plants cast as the Cold War equivalent of the Japanese soldier who hid on an island years after the end of World War II, certain the emperor expected him to fight on.
Indeed, most of the media seems certain Russia’s sleeper-spies could have learned more just reading the newspapers and padding their Moscow reports with crib notes from C-SPAN. As the New York Times editorialized: “The only things missing in more than a decade of operation were actual secrets to send home to Moscow.”
Well, I’m not so sure – or at least I’m not so sure I can be so sure after so few days, relying only on what FBI sources drib out to the media.
Were the deep Russians really that hapless? Consider Russian 10, “Donald Howard Heathfield.” Of the bits and pieces leaking out into the media, we’re told he ran a consultancy called Future Map, which claimed to be advised by former Clinton NSC official Leon Feurth. Feurth, for his part, quickly and categorically denied having any role in Heathfield’s venture – but he did report Heathfield had approached him at a conference, suggesting a joint project, which Feurth turned down.
The other bit we know – tied again to Heathfield – is that he talked to at least one scientist involved in the U.S. government’s bunker-buster munitions program: A massive weapon very useful for destroying hardened sites, like the kind that might shelter a secret nuclear weapons facility.
Now, Heathfield may have come up empty – who of us outside the FBI can know for sure? – but you can’t say he wasn’t focused on making interesting friends on interesting issues.
He then offers “Six Degrees of Separation: International Spy Edition.” (Go to the link to read it).
Meanwhile, the Christian Science Monitor’s Peter Grief bluntly asks the question:
Were the Russian spy suspects really incompetent? Or did their bosses back in Moscow set them up in situations where they were doomed to fail?
Well, the Russian SVR espionage service certainly did not run the operation as the CIA would have, if declassified CIA manuals on use of deep cover are any guide. At least one expert blames Kremlin handlers for the alleged agents’ apparent haplessness.
“They are not incompetent. They were simply not being used productively in the current circumstances,” says Haviland Smith, a retired CIA station chief, in an e-mail response to a reporter’s question.
To explore this question today is to engage in retrospection, of course. The 10 alleged agents are on their way home, having pleaded guilty in US court as part of an elaborate US-Russia spy swap. There, they are likely to be lionized by ordinary Russians, many of whom grew up on movies and TV shows that glorified the exploits of “illegals,” or deep cover spies.
In the US they have left behind a reputation that’s much different. Yes, there’s some glamour in it – the sultry Anna Chapman has seen to that. But as spies, they did not seem to do much, you know, actual spying. According to the Justice Department indictments and other US government documents released so far, they did little but chat up ex-fundraisers for Bill Clinton or congressional aides who lived in the neighborhood, and then puff up their contacts in communications with Moscow.
Maybe if they stayed to blend in they would have enrolled in Glenn Beck University.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.