How the Spy Swap Plays in Russia: Darkly

(July 10) -- The arrest of ten Russian spies in the U.S., and the subsequent agreement to swap them for Russian prisoners, has created a furor in the Russian press very different from the U.S. obsession with sexy Facebook pictures and the fate of the children.

The Russians have been much more drawn to probing the mysterious motives, whether real or imaginary, that lurk in the shadows behind this bizarre episode.

Initially, Russia's reaction was one of nearly total skepticism. The word "spies" was almost always given in scare-quotes, suggesting that the FBI's story was a fabrication. The influential newspaper Kommersant wrote that "the biggest Russian spy scandal in U.S. [history] seems the least convincing and the most unnecessary."

Virtually every Russian analysis of the events included a comparison to pulp fiction or Hollywood spy movies. Everything in the story seemed improbable. Would highly-trained spies be using Morse code and invisible ink – in the 21st century? Would Russia's foreign intelligence service, the SVR, really rely upon such minor and clumsy operatives?

That the spies apparently lacked any obvious access to social or political circles was lost on no one. The comment made by one of the defense lawyers that the FBI's evidence "essentially suggests that they successfully infiltrated neighborhoods, cocktail parties and the PTA" has been widely repeated in the Russian press.

In particular, the Russian press and its Soviet and Russian intelligence sources agreed that the alleged instructions from Moscow, as "decoded" by the FBI, "appear overly naïve and Hollywoodish," as the newspaper Vremia novoste put it. It struck Russians as unbelievable that Moscow "apparently" or "purportedly" expected its suburban agents to report on Obama's ideas and tactics, the state of its nuclear technologies, and much more.

The official Russian reaction on June 28, when the arrest of the spies was made public, was initially sharp and emotionally charged, fueling the distrust. Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov commented drily to the press that "it hasn't been explained to us. I hope it will be explained. The moment at which it was done was selected so elegantly..."

But by the evening the Russian government had formulated an official line: This scandal would not derail the "reset" of US-Russian relations. Once the Foreign Ministry admitted that most of those arrested were Russian citizens, and especially after news of an impending swap, doubts about the veracity of the allegations subsided. They were replaced by incredulity at the apparent incompetence of the SVR and by deeper questions about the manner in which events unfolded.

The issues that continue to evoke the greatest cynicism in Russia are the timing of the FBI's action and the enormous publicity immediately showered upon the story. "The moment chosen by the American intelligence agencies to neutralize the alleged spies makes quite an impression," writes the weekly Novye Izvestiia. "To judge by the public data, the investigation was conducted over months, even years. But the arrests happened to be made right after Dmitrii Medvedev's visit to the U.S. and right before former President Bill Clinton's visit to Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin."

Aleksei Malashenko of the Carnegie Center in Moscow, according to RBK Daily, said that "U.S. intelligence agencies work tirelessly and it's no surprise that they periodically succeed in tracking down agents. But the results of such operations most often are not made public. In this case, it's a matter of political expediency." He goes on to say that fostering closer relations with Moscow ruffles the feathers of Republicans, who have influence on the military and intelligence.

As the Nezavisimaia Gazeta reported, Professor Viktor Kremeniuk of the Institute of the U.S. and Canada agreed that the arrests were provoked by factions within the U.S. that oppose the Obama administration's Russian policies. Dmitrii Trenin, the chief of the Moscow Carnegie Center, told Kommersant that he believes that at least two groups could have organized the arrests: first, politicians who believe that Obama is too friendly towards Russia, and second, the intelligence community itself, which may have sought to bolster a reputation for competence and effectiveness that has suffered in recent years.

For good or ill, Russians have a tendency to read between the lines, even at the expense of the lines themselves. This may lead them to examine news reports more closely for hidden meanings, but it also creates a weakness for conspiracy theories. In the Russian context, the idea that the story is simply true on its face, that the timing of the arrests was a mere unfortunate coincidence with Obama's meeting with Medvedev, has been adopted by a few Russian analysts trying to buck the trend.

Alexander Arkhangelsky, one of Russia's most influential liberal journalists, commented on the issues in a video on the Russian Information Agency (RIA) web site. Echoing that the story seems absurd enough for a spy novel, he presents another "hidden meaning" scenario: that the spies were intentionally incompetent, eager to be discovered and deported because they had already been recruited into the service of American intelligence. They are being exchanged, of course, for political prisoners who have entered the service of Russian intelligence in exchange for their freedom. He dismisses this version of events as fantasy.

As for the swap itself, the Russian press generally holds that was a manifestly unequal exchange, and thus conceals political considerations of which we may be unaware. "Now they're exchanging an incarcerated scientist for God knows what," Arkhangelsky wrote, including "the kind of girl used in espionage as bait, but to whom no one would think of giving a serious assignment."

In exchange for the ten who didn't even merit formal espionage charges, the Americans freed Alexander Zaporozhsky, a man who helped catch the two most damaging moles in U.S. intelligence history. Igor Sutyagin, another exchange, was convicted of passing on key information on the latest generation of Russian atomic submarines --which even if not true, as he still claims, suggests a level of access far beyond the local PTA.

In the end, both Moscow and Washington appear to have concluded that the scandal shouldn't stand in the way of improving U.S.-Russian relations. But that won't dispel the conviction of many Russians that the murky forces standing behind this episode will persist in their machinations to undermine those ties in the future.