Modern Mata Hari?

A Russian spy ring, a red-haired femme fatale undercover agent, and now a Cold War style exchange of prisoners: the ten alleged spies will be deported, and in return, Moscow apparently is freeing four prisoners.

Life in the fast lane, glamorous adventures and dry martinis at hotel bars? No, the lives the alleged Russian spies led in the U.S. weren’t like that. They led inconspicuous, straitlaced lives in American suburbs. Donald Heathfield, business consultant, and his wife Tracey Foley, realtor, lived in Boston. Natalia Perevereza and Mikhail Kutsik lived and worked under different names in Alexandria. At the end of June, they were apprehended, along with six others, as alleged Russian spies.

Anna Chapman, a lively 28 year old real estate agent, was also among them. The imaginations of tabloid journalists everywhere ran wild: when a curvy redhead, of whom there are erotic photos on the Internet, turns out to be a spy, certain story ideas occur to anyone who has ever seen a James Bond movie.

With new quotes about her sexual appetite from ex-lovers emerging every day, always paired with the same photo of Chapman on a bed, the woman dubbed “Agent Zero-Zero-Sex” by the Bild newspaper is now styled as a modern Mata Hari. It is unknown, however, what information she received, whether she used her feminine appeal or possibly even sex, or whether she even had an important role in the Russian spy ring.

Everything is mysterious in a case like this. It reminds us of Cold War times, which are distant not only in terms of time. Why is it that modern Russia still spies at a time when the academic-political circles in the U.S. are really open to anyone? The Washington Post believes it has found an explanation: a lasting “KGB paranoia.” Russian intelligence assumes publicly available reports have a classified addendum and that there are sinister motives hiding behind the openness of institutions which welcome foreign citizens. This is just speculation — like so much in this case.

Alleged Spies Plead Guilty

On Thursday, a few days after the FBI busted the purported spy ring, word came out that the U.S. and Russia were negotiating an exchange of spies. At first there was no official confirmation. “The Justice and State departments [are] referring all questions to each other,” the Post wrote, frustrated.

The source of the rumor was Anna Stavitskaya, attorney for Russian scientist Igor Sutyagin. Sutyagin has been sitting in a Russian jail since 2004 after being accused of treason and espionage. According to unanimous agency reports, he is supposed to have been set free and flown to Vienna.

Meanwhile, the ten alleged spies pled guilty before a U.S. court on Thursday afternoon. Now, nothing stands in the way of their deportation; the alleged agents would be expelled immediately and never again be allowed to return, said a judge in New York.

Possibly the largest exchange of spies since the Cold War is evidently in the works for America and Russia: according to statements by the U.S. government, Moscow will free four prisoners in exchange for the ten Russian spies. It was at first unclear who these four were. In the United States, it was only reported that they were four people who had been convicted because of contact with Western intelligence agencies.

In addition to physicist Sutyagin, there were three other ex-spies being talked about: Alexander Zaporozhsky, a former secret agent who was given an 18-year sentence in Russia after a trip to America; Alexander Sypachov, who received an eight-year sentence in 2002 for spying for the CIA; and Sergei Skripal, an ex-agent of the military intelligence agency GRU, who spied for Britain and was sentenced to 13 years in prison, and who is known in Russian intelligence agency circles as a super agent. Americans who are convicted of spying in Russia do not find themselves in Russian jails, incidentally.

Igor Sutyagin, the fourth possible spy to be exchanged, worked as a weapons control analyst at an American institute in Moscow. He was arrested in 1999 for allegedly giving information about nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British firm that was working with the CIA. In 2004, a Russian court sentenced him to 14 years in prison.

Curious Behavior

International human rights groups championed Sutyagin’s cause because they believed him to be innocent. Trying to exonerate him, they accused the FSB, the Russian domestic intelligence agency, of merely wanting to create panic by arresting Sutyagin. Sutyagin’s former employer, on the other hand, confirmed to U.S. media that the researcher often behaved curiously and made foreign trips without prior arrangements.

Sutyagin himself disputed the accusations — until now. Statements by his attorney indicate he has now signed a confession in order to make the prisoner exchange possible. His family let it be known that, in doing so, he wants to spare the Russian suspects in the U.S. a jail term. It is the only means of escaping imprisonment for him, as well.

For President Barack Obama, apprehension of the espionage suspects comes at a bad time. He has been endeavoring, after all, to relax tension between the United States and Russia. Only a few days before the FBI coup, Obama met in Washington with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev. The espionage affair is grist to the mill for those who see the president’s line on Russia as too yielding.

The exchange of spies could be interpreted as a concession. Such maneuvers between East and West, often on the Glienicke Bridge, were not unusual before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 — although those exchanges usually took place only after spies had served part of their sentence. However, Obama prefers a rapid exchange of spies to protracted court trials that could put a strain on the U.S.-Russia relationship for years to come.