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Friday, July 9, 2010

Prisoner Swap in Vienna Ends U.S.-Russia Espionage Case - NYTimes.com

Prisoner Swap in Vienna Ends U.S.-Russia Espionage Case

Matthias Schrader/Associated Press

A Vision Airlines jet believed to be carrying the Russian agents parked near a Russian plane at a Vienna airport on Friday.

By NICHOLAS KULISH, PETER BAKER AND ELLEN BARRY

Published: July 9, 2010

VIENNA — In a seeming flashback to the cold war, Russian and American officials traded prisoners in the bright sunlight on the tarmac of Vienna’s international airport on Friday, bringing to a quick end an episode that had threatened to disrupt relations between the countries.

Planes carrying 10 convicted Russian sleeper agents and 4 men accused by Moscow of spying for the West swooped into the Austrian capital, once a hub of clandestine East-West maneuvering, and the men and women were transferred, the Justice Department said. The planes soon took off again in a coda fitting of an espionage novel.

The first sign that the exchange — one of the biggest in over two decades — was under way came as a Vision Airlines jet carrying the Russian agents deported from the United States touched down and taxied to park only a matter of yards from the Russian plane from Moscow’s Emergencies Ministry. For a while the only sign of movement was an unidentified emissary shuttling between the airplanes.

Then, more than an hour later, with little fanfare and no formal announcement from either side, the Russian-flagged plane took off into clear blue skies, closely followed by the American airplane. News reports on Friday said that the American plane had landed at a British military base in central England and later that the Russian plane had arrived in Moscow.

Skipping on down...

A lawyer for one of four prisoners freed by the Russian government called it “a historic moment” and said she believed her client, a former Russian intelligence agent named Aleksandr Zaporozhsky, would be reunited with members of his family, who live in the United States.

Within hours of the New York court hearing, the Kremlin announced that President Dmitri A. Medvedev had signed pardons for the four men Russia considered spies after each of them signed statements admitting guilt.

The Kremlin identified them as Igor V. Sutyagin, an arms control researcher held for 11 years; Sergei Skripal, a colonel in Russia’s military intelligence service sentenced in 2006 to 13 years for spying for Britain; Mr. Zaporozhsky, a former agent with Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service who has served 7 years of an 18-year sentence; and Gennadi Vasilenko, a former K.G.B. major who was arrested in 1998 for contacts with a C.I.A. officer but eventually released only to be arrested again in 2005 and later convicted on illegal weapons charges.

Yelena P. Lebedeva-Romanova, a lawyer for Mr. Skripal, 59, said she was very pleased that he had received an amnesty, in part because he suffers from diabetes and she worried about the effects of prison camp life on his health.

Mr. Zaporozhsky’s lawyer, Maria A. Veselova, said attorney-client privilege prevented her from revealing details of the negotiations that led to his release, but said she had long detected signs that he might be freed.

“For the last couple of years I was absolutely sure it was going to happen,” said Ms. Veselova, who represented Mr. Zaporozhsky in the 2003 espionage trial where he was sentenced to 18 years. “It has to do with the relations between the two countries, and with political games going on at the top. It is always connected with these chess games.”

But for the second day, Mr. Sutyagin’s family, who live in the scientific community of Obninsk about 60 miles outside Moscow, were relying on news reports to track his whereabouts.