Russian Double Agent Helped Lead U.S. to Spies
A high-ranking member of the Russian foreign intelligence service (SVR) is on the run after it was revealed that he led U.S. authorities to the spy ring that helped make sultry secret agent Anna Chapman famous this past summer, reported the Kommersant newspaper Thursday.
The business daily wrote an article identifying the traitor as "Colonel Shcherbakov," - no first name given - a man with a daughter in the United States whose job in the SVR was to plant civilian moles in the United States similar to the deep cover spy ring he gave up.
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He allegedly fled Russia for the United States three days prior to President Dmitry Medvedev's June visit to Washington, the newspaper reported.
It is probably a good thing he got out of Russia when he did, as the newspaper also quoted an anonymous Kremlin official saying that Shcherbakov has a huge target on him now.
"Do not doubt that a Mercader has been sent after him already," the Kremlin official said, referring to Russian agent Ramon Mercader, who murdered exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky with an ice axe in 1940 in Mexico.
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There were allegedly many signals that SVR officials should have picked up on, Kommersant reports. Besides his U.S.-loving daughter, Shcherbakov's son quit his post with the Russian drug control agency and fled to the United States shortly before the F.B.I. revealed the spy ring, and Shcherbakov himself allegedly turned down a promotion that might have led to a lie detector test, the paper said.
"This is a big mix-up that will cost (people) many titles and jobs," an intelligence source was quoted as saying.
Scherbakov's alleged help led to the FBI arresting of 10 people as spies in the U.S., who were eventually deported in a prisoner exchange with Moscow. Among them were four couples living in suburbs of New York, Washington and Boston. One woman was a reporter and editor for a prominent Spanish-language newspaper in New York whom the FBI says it videotaped contacting a Russian official in 2000 in Latin America.
Ann Chapman, one of the ten arrested, became famous after pictures of the attractive redhead from her social media were widely circulated in the news and online. She was called a "highly trained" agent, and later posed for the Russian version of Maxim magazine.
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Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin threw a Hero's Welcome when the ten spies came back to Russia, leading the group in a nationalistic sing-a-long.