The final chapter in the recent Russia spy scandal seems to have been written “remarkably quickly”:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/07/08/russia.spy.exchange/index.html?hpt=T1&fbid=nHCmPl-9gl-: shortly after being arrested, the accused Russian agents are being “expelled from the country”:http://edition.cnn.com/2010/CRIME/07/08/russia.spy.exchange/index.html?hpt=T1&fbid=nHCmPl-9gl- as part of a prisoner exchange with Russia. As per the usual, the American media will undoubtedly focus on the “political implications of the exchange”:http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2010/0708/Russia-spies-case-rushes-to-a-close.-Why-the-hurry for the Obama adminstration. But there is a potentially more interesting story here about what the very existence of the Russian agents reveals about the way Russia’s leaders think about political power.
Crucially, none of the the Russia “agents” were charged with espionage, because apparently none had any US state secrets in their possession. There are two potential ways to interpret this. On the one hand, it may be that the agents collectively were fairly incompenent and accomplished little during their 10 years of surveillance. (Although, it should be noted that the job of “sleeper agents” is usually _not_ to start collecting classified information early on in their placement, as the entire point of of a sleeper agent is not to attract attention as he or she blends into the society in which he or she has been inserted.)
More intriguing, however, is the observation that these “sleeper agents” were essentially placed in US society in positions where they were thought to have access to US elites. It may very well have been assumed – probably falsely now in retrospect – that simply being in the same social and professional circles as American elites would eventually lead to the accural of valuable information, without the need to go out and procure (steal) specific types of information. Why is this interesting? Because it probably tells us something about the nature of politics in Russia, where contacts with the right people in the right positions – or, perhaps even more importantly, in the right networks – is indeed the key to power and access, and, perhaps, ultimately important information.
It is also worth noting how quickly the whole question of the scandal seems to have been resolved. Say what you will about the Obama administration’s “reset”:http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6680X820100709 with Russia, but the speed with which this “potentially troublesome event”:http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/30/world/europe/30lavrov.html for US-Russian relations was addressed was certainly unexpected.
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Hat tip: I recently was fortunate enough to be asked to join a program called _PONARS Eurasia_, an acronym for “Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia”:http://ceres.georgetown.edu/esp/ponarseurasia/. Like many such groups, there is an email list for members to communicate with one another, and, not surpirsingly, a lively discussion broke out once the prisoner swap was announced. As these conversations are private, I have not and will not quote directly from anything anyone said. However, my comments above were greatly influenced by the many thoughtful emails I read from members of this group. Going forward, readers can be assured that future posts related to national security in Eurasia will also benefit from my contact with the many members of this group. In addition, I thank Cory Welt, Mark Kramer and “Dimitry Gorenburg”:http://russiamil.wordpress.com/ for specific suggestions regarding the content of my post.
Hat tip II to “Marc Hanna”:http://hannapalooza.blogspot.com/, for requesting this post.