Russian Spies Betrayed By A Russian Intelligence Official
The network of Russian spies discovered in June in the United States was delivered to the American authorities by a senior official of the intelligence services in Moscow, announced on Thursday the Russian daily Kommersant. The newspaper also calims to have identified the traitor in the person of colonel Shcherbakov, whose first name is not specified, a representative of the SVR, the foreign intelligence service.
According to an anonymous source cited by the Kommersant, Shcherbakov had been working for a long time with the SVR as head of the Foreign Intelligence Service’s department, a position which allowed him to be in contact with all the ”illegal” agents abroad. He was therefore the superior of the ten Russian agents arrested in June in the United States, and who were later handed over to Moscow in an exchange of prisoners, in an operation worthy of the Cold War. The colonel fled Russia and went to the United States three days before the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it had arrested the members of a Russian spy ring. But the Russian services did not suspect anything, despite the fact that Shcherbakovʼs daughter had been living in the US for the past ten years and that his son, who worked for the Russia’s anti-drug agency Gosnarkokontrol, had also left the country shortly before. Moreover, Shcherbakov himself refused to accept a promotion last years because that would require him to pass a lie detector test and, it is believed, he had already been working for the United States.
A moth after the ten agents were arrested in the US, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, himself a former agent of the foreign intelligence service within the KGB, clearly indicated the involvement of the Russian intelligence in an action of “high treason”. He even threatened the traitors saying that they would always end up badly, a veiled allusion to the tradition of revenging against runagate intelligence agents.
The case of colonel Shcherbakov triggered an extensive internal investigation into the SVR, and among those investigated are several active and retired members of the intelligence service. But so far no one can tell why the colonel betrayed his country, if he did it for money or because he was cornered with something. Neverthelss, according to the newspapar, a Mercader was already put on his tail, reffering to the name of a Spanish agent of the NKDV (the forerunner of the KGB), who murdered the exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky with an ice axe in 1940 in Mexico.
In June the United States announced that it discovered a spy ring that had been operating on American soil for ten years. According to the FBI, the ten Russian agents used forged documents and assumed stolen identities, enrolled at American universitites and joined professional organizations. Later they passed to the SVR information about the US policy in Central America, US interpretation of Russian foreign policy or problems with US military policy. Fot this they used mesaages hidden inside digital photoes, written in invisible ink or through wirless networks or shortwave radio transmissions. The ten agents were charged with espionage, but a few days later they were exchanged for four Russian nationals, 3 of whom had been convicted and imprisoned by Russia on the same charges.
