Russian Spies Plead Guilty in Swap Echoing Cold War (Update4)
By Patricia Hurtado
July 9 (Bloomberg) -- Ten convicted members of a Russian spy ring, some of whom posed as ordinary Americans for more than a decade, were exchanged with four men jailed in Russia, bringing a rapid conclusion to a case that began 12 days ago.
The members of network, broken up June 28 with arrests in the New York area, Boston and Arlington, Virginia, pleaded guilty yesterday in Manhattan federal court to conspiring to work as unregistered foreign agents.
“The Russian Federation agrees to release four individuals who are incarcerated in Russia for alleged contact with the United States,” U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood in Manhattan said at the plea hearing, referring to the deal.
Wood sentenced them to time served and ordered the accused deported. The U.S. won’t drop money-laundering charges against eight members of the ring until “the full terms of the intergovernmental agreement” between Russia and the U.S. are met, Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Farbiarz said in court. Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd confirmed today that the exchange was completed in Vienna. The Associated Press reported the plane with the 10 Russian spies landed in Moscow.
One by one, each of the foreign agents admitted carrying money or coded messages, secretly communicating with Russian officials and instructing others on how to find information useful to Russia. Their objective was to infiltrate U.S. policy- making circles after constructing false American identities in suburbs and cities along the East Coast, prosecutors said.
`Sends a Message'
The case “sends a message to every other intelligence gathering agency that if you come over here to spy, you will be exposed and arrested,” said Preet Bharara, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan. The timing of the arrests wasn’t for the purpose of obtaining a “bargaining chip” to trade for Russian prisoners, Bharara said.
President Dmitry Medvedev pardoned four people convicted of spying in Russia, spokeswoman Natalia Timakova said. She identified them as Igor Sutyagin, Sergei Skripan, Gennady Vasilenko and Alexander Zaporozhsky.
U.S. and Russian aircraft taking part in the exchange of the 14 convicted spies left Vienna International Airport after parking nose-to-tail on a remote section of runway.
The Russian Foreign Ministry and foreign intelligence service declined to comment.
The exposure of a so-called deep-cover operation --followed by a prisoner exchange -- reprises a spy drama that has played out repeatedly since the 1940s.
Soviet Networks
The agents who pleaded guilty yesterday follow a line of networks the former Soviet Union planted to better understand American society as well as obtain military and policy secrets, intelligence experts said.
“This is exactly the same illegals program that has been in existence since the beginning of the Cold War,” Vincent Cannistraro, a former counter-terrorism chief with the Central Intelligence Agency, said in an interview. “The assumed names, their methodology is the same. It worked very well in the 1960s, but the world has changed. I think you have an old-fashioned mentality in Russia running things.”
The U.S. has conducted other spy swaps under similar circumstances.
In 1957, the U.S. charged Rudolf Ivanovich Abel with espionage, saying the artist known to his neighbors in Brooklyn, New York, as Emil Goldfus was really a colonel in the Soviet Union’s intelligence service, or KGB. Abel was tried and convicted of espionage and sentenced to 30 years in prison.
U-2 Pilot
Abel was exchanged in 1962 for downed U-2 spy-plane pilot Francis Gary Powers at Glienicke Bridge, the famed “Bridge of Spies” that linked Berlin to Potsdam in the former East Germany. Abel had been exposed by another “illegal” living in a small house in Peekskill, New York, as Eugene Maki, a name stolen from an American whose family had moved to Estonia. Maki defected to the U.S.
In August 1986, Gennadiy Zakharov, a scientist with the United Nations, was arrested on a Queens, New York, subway platform by agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, after paying $1,000 for secret documents about the design of jet engines. Zakharov was indicted on espionage charges by federal prosecutors in Brooklyn. A week later, the Soviet Union arrested American journalist Nicholas Daniloff and accused him of espionage.
After negotiations with the U.S. State Department, Daniloff was allowed to leave the Soviet Union without standing trial. The next day, Zakharov pleaded “no contest” to a count of conspiring to commit espionage and attempting to transmit national defense information to the Soviet Union.
Basement Garage
He was sentenced to time-served by U.S. District Judge Joseph McLaughlin and released immediately to the Soviet government in the courthouse basement’s garage.
Andrew J. Maloney, the Brooklyn U.S. attorney at the time, said Zakharov’s arrest on the eve of a summit meeting between former President Ronald Reagan and Russia’s then-President Mikhail Gorbachev in Iceland drew criticism.
“I remember a Washington D.C. columnist saying, ‘Who’s that madman in Brooklyn arresting this guy on the eve of the Icelandic meeting?” Maloney said in an interview.
He said the U.S. didn’t view the exchange as a “quid pro quo,” because as part of the agreement other Soviet dissidents were released later.
‘Very Hot’
“If you think back to the Cold War, even when things were very hot, what we’d do in the U.S. was catch these spies and they’d end up in an exchange situation,” he said.
Maloney, now in private practice, said the current ring nestled in affluent towns such as Montclair, New Jersey and Cambridge, Massachusetts, shouldn’t be dismissed as trivial.
“Who knows what they’re really doing?” he said. “It’s a very serious threat. In the future, if we have a problem with a new regime in Russia, these people could be called upon to do sabotage or harm the country,” he said. “I don’t dismiss this case at all.”
The case is U.S. v. Metsos, 10-cr-00598, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
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