Hey sports fans, who can forget the 1982 trade Ivan DeJesus to the Philadelphia Phillies for Larry Bowa and Ryne Sandberg to the Chicago Cubs? Baseball’s not your cup of tea? How about hockey and the “Great One”? On August 9, 1988, in a move that heralded significant change in the NHL, the Edmunton Oilers traded phenom Wayne Gretzky, along with Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski, to the Los Angeles Kings for Jimmy Carson, Martin Gelinas, $15 million in cash, and the Kings' first-round draft picks in 1989. It upset Canada no end and was simply referred to as “The Trade.” Okay, okay… maybe you’re not a sports fan. Maybe you prefer spy-trades. After all, someone who Benedict Arnolds their way into your nation’s secrets and then lives to enjoy a rich and fulfilling “hero’s welcome” in their employer’s country has to be interesting, no?
On May 1, 1960, American spy-plane (the very high altitude Lockheed U-2 aircraft) pilot, Francis Gary Powers, was shot down over Soviet airspace and taken prisoner. His U-2 was carefully taken apart by his Russian captors, apparently all on purpose: the CIA was about to replace the aging spy-plane with the next generation A-12 (precursor to the SR71 "Blackbird") and simply wanted the Soviets to concentrate their defenses on the obsolete U-2. Powers didn’t have to rot too long in a Soviet prison, because in 1962, he was exchanged for Soviet KGB spy Col. Rudolph Abel held by the U.S.
Why execute spies when you can trade ‘em like baseball cards? And some of these “cards” can have some pretty extreme value. Like the June 12, 1985 hurriedly-arranged trade of 23 American agents held in Eastern Europe for Polish agent Marian Zacharski and another three Soviet agents arrested in the West. Pete Rose wasn’t part of that swap, however. I’m picturing “spy scouts” and “CIA general managers” taking notes, assigning point values to the various players, and then negotiating “the deal.” Wonder if the spy-equivalent of future draft choices – the potential of “we owe you one spy-release” will ever enter into the equation?
So, what up? Like now? Well we all know about the recent story of 10 “deep cover” alleged Russian spies, trying without a whole lot of success to worm their way into “policy-making circles,” that the FBI has been tracking for seven years: “They had lived for more than a decade in American cities and suburbs from Seattle to New York, where they seemed to be ordinary couples working ordinary jobs, chatting to the neighbors about schools and apologizing for noisy teenagers… Criminal complaints filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on [June 28th] read like an old-fashioned cold war thriller: Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past one another in a train station stairway. An identity borrowed from a dead Canadian, forged passports, messages sent by shortwave burst transmission or in invisible ink. A money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York… But the network of so-called illegals — spies operating under false names outside of diplomatic cover — also used cyber-age technology, according to the charges. They embedded coded texts in ordinary-looking images posted on the Internet, and they communicated by having two agents with laptops containing special software pass casually as messages flashed between them.” New York Times (June 28th). This included the 28-year-old hottie, Anna Chapman (nee Anya Kushchenko) who got lots of photographic press as a result of the arrest.
OK, so they kind of fizzled on their purported post-Cold War secret missions and the Russians went into first class denial mode, but then the bookmakers started looking for the potential swap. Who would the U.S. likely want to extract from Russian “spy jail”? The Washington Post (July 8th) speculates: “Igor Sutyagin, a Russian disarmament researcher, is one of Moscow's biggest bargaining chips in a possible spy swap with the United States….Sutyagin was working for the Institute for the Study of the United States and Canada in Moscow 11 years ago when he was jailed for allegedly selling information about nuclear submarines and missile warning systems to a British firm. Russian prosecutors alleged that the firm, Alternative Futures, was a front for the CIA… At the time, Sutyagin, then 39, denied the charges, saying that he was a consultant to the firm and that the only information he had collected was from public documents, newspapers and other open sources. He also said he was not aware of any ties between Alternative Futures and the CIA.” That the 10 miscreants all pleaded guilty and they already have their tickets to Moscow (one-way, of course!). Four American "spies" are being sent back from Russia – Sutyagin is heading to London by way of Vienna.
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