A Bad Spy Deal: Ten Rooks for Three…and a Pawn

The Russian spy scandal, which Russian officials denounced as “absolute rubbish,” is now ending with a de facto Russian admission of guilt and an exchange with echoes of the Cold War. At stake was the fate of ten deep cover Russian agents (an eleventh managed to escape) who pretended to be ordinary American citizens and were arrested after a long investigation by the FBI.

Many in the U.S. belittled the danger that such agents represent. But in a system in which lobbyists are common, power is dispersed and loquacity is a habit, Russian agents posing as Americans present more of a threat than many people realize. They can help Russians understand the vanity and stereotypes of American policy makers and glean U.S. intentions to our detriment. They can collect damaging personal information about individuals that can be held by Russian intelligence to be used at the right time. By their very existence, they undermine trust in a society in which through a paradox of American tolerance, they have a real possibility to influence policy and play a political role.

The Russian agents were exchanged for four Russians, one of whom, Igor Sutyagin, a Russian scientist, was almost certainly innocent of any crime. (At least two of the other three were Russians working for the U.S.) The Sutyagin case, however, was just as great a threat to intellectual freedom in Russia as the Russian deep cover spies were in the U.S. Sutyagin was an arms control researcher in the Institute of the U.S.A. and Canada and wrote a report about submarine based ICBM’s for Alternative Futures, a British consulting firm. The FSB said that Alternative Futures was a cover for American intelligence but Sutyagin, a workaholic and gifted researcher, had no access to classified materials. He worked exclusively with open sources as was demonstrated at his trial. His arrest in 1999 and sentencing to 15 years for espionage were intended to intimidate Russian scientists and force them to resort to self censorship in their cooperation with foreign colleagues and his case had an immediate, chilling effect.

Russian scholars, even in humanitarian fields, began limiting what they shared with foreign colleagues. In the months since the Obama administration “reset” U.S.-Russian relations, there has been a complete de emphasis on the issue of human rights. Normally, the Sutyagin case would have been raised, along with many other similar cases, at high level meetings in order to try to gain his release without implicitly corroborating Russian fabrications. This, however, was not done and the innocent Sutyagin was included in an exchange for ten Russian agents whose guilt could otherwise have been legally established. The administration thereby becomes complicit in the restriction of intellectual freedom in both countries and, equally important, continues to delude itself that Russia can be treated as a true friend.