MOSCOW – President Dmitry Medvedev awarded Russia’s highest state honours yesterday to a group of sleeper agents who were deported from the United States in a cold war-style spy swap in July.
Kremlin spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said the spies had been honoured at a Kremlin ceremony along with other members of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service.
“A ceremony took place in the Kremlin today to give the highest state awards to members of the Foreign Intelligence Service, including spies working in the United States who returned to Russia in July,” Ms Timakova said by telephone.
Most of the Russian agents have kept a very low profile since they were exchanged in Vienna for four individuals who had been imprisoned in Russia for contacts with western intelligence agencies, but Moscow has promised they will be looked after.
Prime minister Vladimir Putin, who was a KGB agent in East Germany during the Soviet era, met the spies at an undisclosed location after they returned, sang Soviet songs with them and promised them a bright future.
He said he admired what they did and issued a warning that those who betrayed their compatriots would end up paying a heavy price. The Kremlin honoured the agents despite widespread media reports that the spy ring failed to secure any major secrets.
Starting in the 1990s, from Virginia to Boston to Seattle, the agents attended elite Ivy League schools in an apparent effort to meet future power brokers.
They obtained influential jobs, married, had children and bought homes in upmarket areas.
Court documents released in the United States described how the Russian agents hobnobbed with academics and assembled data on expensive Manhattan real estate, but did not accuse them of actually passing classified information to Moscow.
Anna Chapman, whose pictures posted on social networking website Facebook made her a media sensation, is the only one of the 10 spies to have made public appearances since the operation was discovered. – (Reuters)