Russia, U.S. complete biggest spy swap since Cold War

The whirlwind exchange took place Friday in a choreographed script of spy novel intrigue: Two planes, one from New York, the other from Moscow, arrived within minutes of each other in Vienna and parked nose-to-tail. Their passengers - 10 Russian sleeper agents arrested in the United States and four prisoners accused by Russia of spying for the West - were ferried to each other, and the planes departed again just as quickly.

The culmination of the biggest spy swap since the Cold War, seen only at a distance through camera lenses, took less than 90 minutes.

Ten admitted Russian agents who had blended into U.S. communities soon landed in Moscow, while four Russians accused by their homeland of espionage and other charges flew in a chartered maroon-and-white Boeing 767-200 to an air base in southern England.

In a brief stopover, two of the four were dropped off before the plane continued across the Atlantic, arriving at Dulles International Airport outside Washington at the end of the capital's workday, a U.S. official said.

The four - Igor Sutyagin, Sergei Skripal, Gennady Vasilenko and Alexander Zaporozhsky - were pardoned by President Dmitry Medvedev before their departure. Russia required signed confessions from them to make way for pardons.

A U.S. official confirmed Skripal, a former colonel in the Russian military intelligence sentenced in 2006 to 13 years for spying for Britain, and Sutyagin, a nuclear specialist convicted of passing information to a UK firm allegedly used as a front by the CIA, were the two who disembarked in Britain.

Vasilenko is a former KGB major who worked in Washington and Latin America in the 1970s and '80s. He was accused by Russia of spying, though the United States said he never became a spy. Zaporozhsky, a former colonel in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, or SVR, was sentenced in 2003 for revealing the identities of more than 20 U.S.-based Russian spies. He worked for a U.S. firm in Maryland after his retirement from the SVR in 1997 until his arrest on a trip to Moscow in 2001.

In Moscow Friday, the former head of Russia's domestic security agency said the entire saga was an attempt "to influence policy toward Russia." Nikolai Kovalyov, who headed the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB from 1996 to 1998, said: "It was an attempt to interfere in Obama's reset" of relations with Russia, "and to compromise Obama himself."

Russia's Foreign Ministry and the State Department hailed the swift resolution of the spy situation as evidence of improved ties between the two countries under Obama. Russia's Foreign Ministry said Friday the exchange of four convicted spies for 10 Russian citizens should help to deter "attempts to divert the two sides from this course."

The 10 who left the United States late Thursday admitted secretly communicating with Russian officials and instructing others on how to find information useful to Russia. Their objective was to infiltrate U.S. policy-making circles after constructing false American identities in suburbs and cities along the East Coast, prosecutors said. A White House official said all eight children of some of the 10 had left the United States or are in process of leaving.

In New York, the U.S. attorney's office dropped all charges against the 10.

"As a result of the successful exchange in Vienna, Austria . . . the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York has requested that the court dismiss any remaining charges," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.

With Pervaiz Shallwani