The importance of espionage has been recognised since the beginning of recorded history.
During World War I, all the great powers had elaborate civilian espionage systems and all national military establishments had intelligence units. Germany and Japan established elaborate espionage nets in the years preceding World War II.
Mata Hari, (real name Margaretha Zelle, a Dutch dancer) who obtained information for Germany by seducing French officials, was the most noted espionage agent of World War I.
Famous Cold War espionage cases include Alger Hiss and Whittaker Chambers and the Rosenberg Case. The Cambridge spy ring consisting of Guy Burgess, Donald Mclean and Harold 'Kim' Philby for the Soviet Union in the late 50s rocked Britain.
In 1952 the Communist Chinese captured two CIA agents, and in 1960 Francis Gary Powers, flying a U-2 reconnaissance mission over the Soviet Union for the CIA, was shot down and captured.
SVR and GRU (Russia's political and military intelligence agencies, respectively) are operating against the U.S. in a much more active manner than they were during even the hottest days of the Cold War according to former GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev.
Spies arrested:
On 27th June, 10 Russian spies from SRV agency were arrested by FBI in the eastern states of the US. They were arrested after an investigation lasting more than a decade,
Their intercepted messages showed that they were told by Moscow's political intelligence agency to collect information on broad swath of topics including nuclear weapons, Us arms control, Iran, CIA leadership turnover, the last Presidential election, the Congress and political parties.. After the arrest, the US did not accuse Russia lest it spoils its repaired relations.
Intelligence in June revealed that a number of the agents might have been planning to leave. One of them, 28-year-old Anna Chapman, was reportedly lured to a Manhattan coffee shop by an undercover FBI agent after which, in an intercepted phone call, she was told her cover may have been blown and she should leave the US.
The US did not charge them with espionage because they did not obtain classified information but only to a single count of conspiracy to act an agent of a foreign government.
Under pressure from the Obama administration, US prosecutors moved from arrest and incarceration to plea bargain
The 10 Russian spies, wearing prison overalls, had earlier pleaded guilty in a Manhattan court in New York. Some of the spies addressed the court in heavy accents despite years of apparently blameless life in New York's north eastern suburbs.
"I agreed to communicate via laptop with another person," the flame-haired beauty Anna Chapman said. It is reported Anna Chapman is not her real name, her father Vasily Kushchenko is said to be a former KGB agent and she was born in Ukraine and raised in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad. She was married in London with a Briton, Alex Chapman and was divorced.
Asked if she knew it was illegal to send encrypted messages to a Russian embassy official, she said: "Yes, I did, your honour."
Charges of laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret payments from the Russian foreign intelligence service were dropped.
In accordance with a deal made in secret by top US and Russian diplomats, all 10 were then sentenced to time served and ordered to leave the country.
Spy Swap
The US considered the possibility of a spy swap with Moscow more than two weeks before it arrested 10 Russian agents, US officials said, according to BBC report.
CIA director Leon Panetta quickly told Russian spy chief, Mikhail Fradkov, the names of the four men the US wanted released. US officials said the pair had agreed the details of the swap by 4 July, less than a week after the arrests.
President Barack Obama was briefed on the ring on 11 June, 13 days before he hosted the Russian President at the White House before the arrests.
The Kremlin announced that President Dmitry Medvedev had pardoned four people jailed in Russia for espionage. They all had to sign an oath admitting their guilt as a condition of their release.
The Kremlin said the spies it was freeing were Igor Sutyagin, the military analyst jailed in 2004 for 15 years on charges of passing secrets to the CIA; Alexander Zaporozhsky, a former colonel in Russian foreign intelligence who settled in the US but was lured back to Russia and arrested in 2001; Sergei Skripal, convicted in 2006 of spying for Britain; and Gennady Vasilenko
Riot police set up a security cordon around Lefortovo prison in Moscow, where Sutyagin was reportedly being held after being moved to the capital from a labour camp in the Russian Arctic. Relatives said he maintained his innocence but took part in the swap to help keep his homebound compatriots out of prison
Russian and US flights involved in the 14-member spy swap landed on 9th July night briefly in Vienna, apparently exchanged agents, and then took off again.
In a carefully scripted exchange, the two planes arrived within minutes of each other and parked nose to tail at a remote section on the tarmac.
After 90 minutes, the swap apparently completed, a Russian Yakovlvev Yak-42 plane left Vienna carrying 10 agents deported from the US to Russia. Minutes later, a maroon-and-white Boeing 767-200 that brought those agents in from New York took off, apparently with four Russians convicted of spying for the West.
What awaited them in Russia and where they were to settle remained unclear, but a lawyer for Anna Chapman, the net-worker famous for her sultry looks, suggested she might end up in Britain.
Robert Baum said that 28-year-old Russian divorcee with a Masters degree in economics
Chapman was "happy to get out of jail" and might move to London from Moscow. "She used to have a life there," he said, referring to her past marriage to the Briton Alex Chapman and her work with a business jet-leasing company. Baum said his client would spend time with family in Russia but then hoped to travel to London, which she considered home.
Some say that the swap was among the biggest since the Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky (who as Natan Sharansky became a political figure in Israel) was released along with 8 others in 1986.
Conclusion
It may be recalled that on 24th June, President of Russia visited Washington and President Obama received him warmly. On bilateral relations, Obama said: " Twenty years after the end of the Cold War, the US-Russian relationship has to be about more than just security and arms control. It has to be about our shared prosperity and what we can build on together."
During the visit, the U.S. and Russia had agreed to expand cooperation on intelligence and the counterterror fight and worked on strengthening economic ties between the nations.
Spy swap has defused tensions between Russia and the US at a time when the US has "reset" its relations with Russia.
[By Barrister Harun ur Rashid, former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva]