Top Russian spy defects after betraying U.S. ring

The head of Russia’s deep cover U.S. spying operations has betrayed the network and defected, a Russian paper said on Thursday, potentially giving the West one of its biggest intelligence coups since the end of the Cold War.

The newspaper, Kommersant, named the man as Colonel Shcherbakov, and said he was responsible for unmasking a Russian spy ring in the United States in June whose arrests humiliated Moscow and clouded a “reset” in ties with Washington.

The betrayal would make Shcherbakov one of the most senior turncoats since the fall of the Soviet Union and could have consequences for Russia’s proud Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and its chief, former prime minister Mikhail Fradkov.

This sort of thing sounds like something from the 60’s or 70’s.

All the 10 spies arrested in the United States [as the result of Shcherbakov’s actions] pleaded guilty and were deported to Russia in a spy swap less than two weeks later.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB spy, greeted them as heroes. He said traitors came to a bad end, and that the informer would be left to the mercy of his own kind. “The special services live by their own laws and everyone knows what these laws are,” he said.

Sounds like the defector will be needing witness protection on steroids.

Additional ramifications of the situation include re-integration of foreign intelligence efforts into the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) which is the successor to much of the old KGB, no doubt bringing a warm glow of satisfaction to Putin as he sees things moving back to the way things were in his “good old days”:

Despite Moscow’s tough talk, the revelation could damage the reputation of the SVR. Kommersant cited an unidentified source as saying that Fradkov could be sacked and the SVR folded into the powerful Federal Security Service (FSB), the main successor of the Soviet-era KGB.