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| July 12, 2010: In a seeming flashback to the Cold War, Russian and American officials traded spy prisoners in the bright sunlight on the tarmac of Vienna’s international airport on Friday, July 9, 2010, bringing to a quick end an episode that had threatened to disrupt relations between the two countries, according to The New York Times. Planes carrying 10 convicted Russian sleeper agents and four 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 more than 20 years--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, July 9, 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 by the FBI evoked memories of that time, but it also underscored the new-era relationship between Washington and Moscow. President Obama has made the “reset” of Russian-American relations a top foreign policy priority, and the quiet collaboration about the spy scandal indicates that the Kremlin likewise values the warmer ties. Rahm Emanuel, the White House Chief of Staff, told the PBS-TV program “NewsHour” that the president was fully briefed on the decision and that the case showed that the United States was still watchful even as relations improved. 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 deported. A lawyer for one of four prisoners freed by the Russian government called it “a historic moment” and said she believed her client, a former Russian intelligence agent named Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, would be reunited with members of his family, who live in the United States. 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. 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 7 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. |
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