Real life spy dramas are interesting but what happens after the Big Denouement?
Russian intelligence sources told local media that the traitor who gave away Anna Chapman and nine others was Colonel Alexander Poteyev who served in the KGB’s elite ‘Zenith’ Special Forces unit during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
A criminal case for ‘state treason’ had been opened against him and he will be tried in absentia like other traitors before him, they said.
Hardly surprising…
Fyodor Yakovlev, a KGB veteran who said he served with Colonel Poteyev in Afghanistan, told the Regnum news agency that he now regarded his former comrade as a “non-person”.
“This non-person will live a lonely life until the end of his days in fear,” he said. “Lonely because his relatives and loved ones will not be by his side. Either his children will have to alter their appearances or else they will be doomed to the same nightmarish existence as their father.”
…so his loved one were left behind in Russia when we was extracted by CIA Operations, eh? Pity that but…
Colonel Poteyev is believed to have fled to the United States in June through his native Belarus days before the ten agents were arrested in America. He was reportedly deputy director of ‘Department S’ inside the SVR, the unit which coordinates the work of illegal agents in the United States.
He is reported to have worked in New York in the first half of the 1990s. It was there that the CIA is said to have recruited him, offering him a financial settlement. His wife later became resident in America and his son and daughter moved there before he fled Russia in June.
…er, hang on, Fyodor… did you not just say his loved one were not by his side?
Sorry but sounds to me like some guy called Hank Smith from Chickasaw Falls, plus his wife Wilma, son Hank Jr and daughter Natasha… er, I mean Britney… are living Happily Ever After and spending that hearty ‘financial settlement’ from Uncle Sam in a suburban strip mall looking forwards to Christmas somewhere with a fuck load better weather than Moscow.
This guy apparently slept through 1991, and missed the goings on of that year. And he seems to have napped through 1953, as well.
So, let me see if I get this straight:
The wife of the Deputy Director of the department in charge of spies in the USA decides to become a resident in said USA; then the remaining family of said Deputy Director decides to move to the USA, and the guy is not only not arrested immediately, but is able to travel around so that he can join his family in the USA. Either he is a double-agent with lots of misinformation for the USA, or the SVR are all a bunch of morons. This is certainly the kind of thing that would NOT have happened in the time of the KGB: how the mighty have fallen.
Mr Davies comment is an interesting one. Given the Soviet, err Russian penchant for long term planning a planting of a ‘traitor to the Motherland’ under US sponsorship isn’t that far fetched. I wonder if the CIA is taking that into account.
Still the rollup of any foreign spy ring here is something for us to cheer about. With so many of them here anyway, I bet they are tripping over themselves. What was so funny (bitterly so) was how the Administration couldn’t even talk up either the spy ring OR the defection of a top Russian intelligence officer.
Either you accept socialism, or you do not.
Having an active security clearance, I’d have reported someone with one who’s spouse moved to a foreign country immediately, if only to cover my own ass.
I don’t know how the Russkis do it, but the US does take security investigations pretty seriously. People like Pollard, Walker, Ames, and Hansen we get reminded of daily