Another hasty move of Obama’s – a spy swap?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
We’ve no sooner absorbed the news that 10 suspected deep-cover spies for Russia have been arrested in the United States than it’s leaked that the Obama Administration might be talking with the Russian government about a prisoner swap.
Quick moves by our president are nothing new, but if true this would be a disaster.
Americans will be living for some time with the consequences of hastily-drawn ObamaCare, the near-trillion dollar Stimulus law, and current financial “reform.”
All were said by Obama to require immediate passage, although most of the health provisions don’t begin until 2014 or later.
Stimulus was said to be urgent. The bill lay on the presidential desk for days before signing and even now is only half spent. There is little to show for any of it.
So now the question, why the puzzling suddenness in getting 10 deep-cover agents over to Mother Russia?
The speculation is that we will get only one person in the exchange, namely Igor Sutyagin, the Russian physicist imprisoned in 2004 allegedly for spying for the U.S.
Some in the media opine that it might be a 10 for 10 deal. But then who are the other nine?
The far bigger point is what’s the hurry? Knowing nothing about Mr. Sutyagin, we’ll give the Obama Administration the point that he is a valuable resource for our side, or was six years ago.
The Russians have had all that time to debrief the last drop of information from him.
He would, however, have to be of the magnitude of the late Francis Gary Powers, our U2 spy pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1962, and swapped for Russian master spy Rudolf Abel, to let any of the 10 Russian agents out of the country before intense investigation of them and their contacts.
Does our side, in fact, know anything about the 10 agents for Russia, other than name, rank and spying’s equivalent of serial number? Or that one of them, an attractive Russian woman named “Anna Chapman,” known in Britain as Anya Kushchenko, the daughter of an important ex-KGB official, has been designated by the media as a “stunning spook”— “hot?”
The 10 are cast as low to elite level types, simulating average to better attainment of the American dream, while building contacts in our business, government and possibly military settings.
Chapman mingled in British bohemian and banker circles from her base working in several London banks. Chapman wound up in New York, owning a successful real estate business seeming to benefit from ample cash pumped in from sources yet to be revealed. She might be the ring’s poster mole.
The most pitiful insight offered publicly in support of the idea of a quick swap is that none of the 10 seem to have actually stolen anything.
To that we’d say, “Who knows?” Until the best people in our CIA and FBI are given the opportunity to run down the many strands in the web that 10 foreign agents can weave over the years, the American people will never know.
That will take far more time than anyone in our government seems ready to give. The Wall Street Journal reports Wednesday as we go to press that the Russians have taken Sutyagin from his cell and told him to prepare to fly to Vienna as step one in an exchange.
The Obama White House would benefit by a refresher course on the “magnificent five” British spies of the 1960s. Kim Philby, Guy Burgess et al. parlayed Cambridge University backgrounds into infiltrating the highest levels of the British Foreign Office, the War Ministry and military intelligence, later betraying everything to the Soviets.
Each of the five had to be found and recruited. That is where U.S. intelligence should be focused on our 10 now.
We’re betting that each had specialties for tapping human weakness for recruitment or valuable contacts.
Judging from the good looks of Anna Chapman, she certainly did.
An offering on the Web invites readers to pick one of four boxes accompanying the story: shocking, infuriating, satisfying, ridiculous.
To that this writer would add: Dangerous.
Don’t let them get away, Mr. President!
July 9, 2010
