It is almost as if President Obama & his foreign policy team could not bear the Russians feeling discomfort for more than five minutes. A Washington Post front-pager reports that spy swaps typically years to arrange; the lack of punishment for these spies may encourage more to risk spying for Russia, in the belief that America no longer regards such activity as serious. The Russian Ten provided little information since their arrest, according to the WP. A second WP story adds detail on the four prisoners Moscow is sending us in the swap.
Ion Marie Pacepa, ex-Romanian intel official & hugely knowledgeable about spies, Russia, etc., writes in TAS that the Russian Ten case proves that Russia still regards America as its main enemy. Pacepa explains that the hasty swap--consummated just four days after Moscow proposed it--protects Russian spy tradecraft from further exposure:
I once met the famous KGB illegal Rudolf Abel, after he was exchanged for U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. He introduced himself to me just as Colonel Abel. "An illegal should die an illegal," Abel told me. In 1972, I was taken to his grave in Moscow. His gravestone displayed two names: Rudolf Ivanovich Abel and Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher. "Was Fisher his real name?" I asked my host, General Sakharovsky, who had just retired after spending fourteen years as head of Soviet foreign intelligence. "Who knows?" he remarked with a friendly wink.
Last yesterday, the U.S. intelligence community lost a unique chance to learn what was behind Russia's current illegal operations. It is a huge mistake to have wasted this opportunity by rushing to exchange the ten illegals for, among others, a Russian who was framed as a spy (and does not want to leave Russia). There is nothing in this exchange for the United States. We should have first learned what we can from the ten illegals, before starting to think about exchanging them. Even the infamous Abel was not exchanged until five years after he was sentenced. And he was exchanged for an American who had made history for the U.S.
(Rudolf Abel, whose 1957 arrest was screaming headlines in the NYC papers of my youth, was swapped for Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot whose plane was shot down over Russia just before the scheduled May 1960 summit in Paris between President Eisenhower & Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. Moscow canceled the summit.) Here is a Cold War bonus: the famous July 1959 "kitchen debate" between then-VP Richard Nixon & Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev at a Moscow trade fair: you can follow body language & intonation only for NK in KD Part I (7:22) & KD Part II (8:44), so here is the KD written transcript. The word exchange reads fairly even, but in the video NK wins going away, obviously able to ham it up in the new medium, versus Nixon's evident awkwardness.
To be fair (back to the present), some analysts, such as Peter Brookes of the Heritage Foundation, believe the four prisoners we got are more valuable than the ten we sent back to Russia. Often haste makes waste, and the transaction would taste better had been been done at a more leisurely pace. WSJ pundit Bret Stephens wonders, however, if the prisoners Russia released were in fact guilty of anything. Arresting people on trumped-up charges has been a Russian (and was a Soviet and even Tsarist) specialty for centuries.
Bottom Line. Russia is not our ally--though perhaps not a mortal enemy, like Iran's Islamist regime. But at minimum, the Motherland is a rival to be reckoned with in the struggle for global geopolitical influence, a contest which will continue whether we participate or withdraw.
The BIG LOSER? Poor Anna Chapman. In the West, after a brief jail term, she would have had BIG MEDIA play--no doubt a pictorial in a men's magazine, plus a ghosted autobio + fiction book that would sell like hot cakes. The Russians, having rushed to close the case, will silence her--no money, no glitz, no fun.
Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, 9/11, National Security, Terrorism, Homeland Security, Foreign Policy, Conservative Politics
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