Final Thoughts on the Russian-American Spy Swap

The ten arrested Russian spies have arrived in Vienna, and shortly will be back in Moscow. Sentenced last night in New York, they gave their real Russian names, pleaded guilty, and were sentenced to time served — a few short days.

Never has a spy swap been orchestrated so quickly. In the era of the Cold War, there were plenty of swaps. The most famous was that of KGB Colonel Rudolf Abel for the U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962. Abel was the name he adopted, when he lived in Greenwich Village and Brooklyn, and posed as an artist. In all the swaps, Russian spies were exchanged after having already served real time in American prisons, and after they had been thoroughly interrogated.

Later, the Soviets exchanged political dissidents who were given freedom in exchange for their spies. The most famous was that of Natan Sharansky. Sharanksy and three low-level Western spies (Czech citizen Jaroslav Javorský and West German citizens Wolf-Georg Frohn and Dietrich Nistroy) were exchanged for Czech spies Karl Koecher and Hana Koecher held in the USA, Soviet spy Yevgeni Zemlyakov, Polish spy Jerzy Kaczmarek and GDR spy Detlef Scharfenorth (the latter three held in Western Germany) in 1986 on Glienicke Bridge.

Attorney General Eric Holder, in a statement for television and the press, readily admitted that what lay behind the exchange was not issues of national security, but the Obama administration’s concern for diplomatic relations with Vladimir Putin’s new Russia. As a New York Times story put it, “President Obama has made the ‘reset’ of Russian-American relations a top foreign policy priority, and the quiet collaboration over the spy scandal indicates that the Kremlin likewise values the warmer ties.”

The issue, however, is whether the results are equally beneficial to both the United States and Russia. Clearly, while our government is bending over backwards to play nice with Putin, the Russian government is up to its old ways in dealing with the United States, as the placement of these sleeper spies indicates.

Some commentators have argued that exchanging them makes sense, since they never got a chance to engage in actual espionage, and hence had been arrested only for money laundering and failing to register as a foreign agent of Russia. That argument misses the point.

These spies were meant not only to recruit others who would do the actual spying — hence the large sums of money in their homes obviously meant to be used to pay recruits — but also to try and obtain positions or placements where they could gain access to the kind of information that is not readily available in press stories or on Google.

The best example of this is the case of young Mikhail Semenko, who never adopted a false American name. Semenko came to America to study international relations and Asia studies at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. After graduating, he got a job with a travel agency called Travel All Russia, and moved with the firm to Arlington, Virginia. But Semenko was from the start an SVR agent, sent to the United States to move up the ladder and eventually gain a position from which he could be of use.

As a story in the London Telegraph reveals, Semenko tried to obtain jobs at both the liberal New America Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Both think tanks, as we know, are closely connected to the Obama administration. Had he been hired by either of them, Semenko would have been in a good position to eventually either get an actual job somewhere in the government — just as Soviet era spies did in the 1940s — or to have regular contact with administration figures who might have shared inside information with him as part other job activities. As the British newspaper explained, “Semenko attended numerous think tank events and was an assiduous networker even for a Washingtonian. … [H]e appeared determined to secure employment closer to the heart of the US government.”

Clearly, both the Russian and American governments hope that with the exchange a done deal, and the spies back in their native Russia, the arrests and the drama will quickly be forgotten. In another week, it will simply be yesterday’s news. Only time will tell whether years from now, we will suddenly learn that the ten were more successful than we imagined, and had recruited others who managed to do actual damage.

This is a very peculiar business.
It would seem the trade was negotiated before the arrest.
As Alice would have said, “Curiouser and curiouser!

"Keep being a good plant.
Send the spies back to our home immediately.
Any interrogation will lead back to the DNC,
to the hundreds of spies recruited ... and us."

3 posted on 07/10/2010 7:53:15 AM PDT by Diogenesis (Article IV - Section 4 - The United States shall protect each of them against Invasion)

It looks to me that they were in too big a hurry to get the spies somewhere they couldn’t be questioned, maybe before they could reveal anything that could lead to uncovering the history of this program and how many other “Americans” are, in reality, long-standing Soviet/Russian agents. I have the feeling that those in a hurry to whisk them off may be the very ones least interested in a public knowledge of origins and participants.

Hmmmm... the look of the eyes of the man in the grey suit. Here are his thoughts...

Do you like your meat Obama? Yes, you do. Remember, we own you. And if you ever cross us, the whole world will know how much you like your meat.

An attorney for one of the dudes that was returned to us said this ahas been in the works for a couple of years. My best guess is that Russia put out feelers for a few that might want to come back to Russia....all expenses paid.

What could be more redundant than Soviet era spies in a nation that has a Soviet era form of government?

Planned obsolescence!

The Venona papers proved Joseph McCarthy was a true American HERO... and that FDR was Joseph Stalin's doofus senior mole for three terms(12 years).. and that Harry Truman was doofus junior groupie..

Barry Half-White was elected a KNOWN Marxist.. and progressive as if the terms are not the same thing..

All that and American Universitys are totally taken over by marxists... brain washing the the future american leaders..

What to do?. about all this...

10 posted on 07/10/2010 8:28:50 AM PDT by hosepipe (This propaganda has been edited to include some fully orbed hyperbole....)

I have been thinking much the same as you and posted this comment on a separate FR thread: “Such a quick “deal” to get these folks out of Dodge must mean they have information neither side wants divulged. I interpret this to mean they have highly damaging information detrimental to the US and to the leftists in the US”. The mere fact that this “swap” was being arranged even before the arrests were effected suggests that neither side wants these “spies” to talk and no one want the rest of the undiscovered spies to be found and rolled up.

it took him longer to acknowledge the gulf disaster than it did to arrange an international spy swap with russia. had to evac them before they were interrogated.... they might let slip they were working during the last election cycle.

where 0bama’s political alliances lie are pretty obvious

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.