It’s hard to keep track of who’s supposed to have outed spy babe Anna Chapman and her fellow Russian sleeper agents. If you believe the Russian press, a certain colonel named Alexander Poteyev is the newest culprit. But all this intrigue sounds like petty inter-spy bureaucracy — or a way to conceal the far-less-sexy prospect that Russian spies aren’t that good anymore.
It wasn’t long ago that the Russian media said a mysterious “Colonel Shcherbakov” in Russia’s Foreign Security Service (SVR) was the one who compromised a spy ring that hid in the U.S. for years. But now there’s reportedly a treason case open into Poteyev for selling out Anna and her comrades.
Not much is known about Colonel Poteyev. Allegedly, he’s a native of Belarus who fought in Afghanistan with the elite “Zenith” group of Soviet special forces. He’s said to have run SVR “illegals” — that is, agents without the protection of diplomatic cover — out of New York in the early 90s, where U.S. intelligence allegedly recruited him before he went back home. Reportedly, Poteyev fled to the U.S. in June, joining his wife and kids.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that sounds like… Colonel Shcherbakov. He was also said to have been an SVR official that secretly worked for and fled to the United States. But Russian officials now tell the press that Shcherbakov was a different traitor — one who defected too early to out Anna and her comrades. Got it?
Shady secret agents betraying a lingerie-clad femme fatale spy and her comrades is spy-thriller stuff. But it might be a mistake to keep all the characters straight. The real drama behind the stories of turncoat colonels might be something less sexy: the Russian government’s bruised egos and factional politics.
As the Moscow Times points out, Russian authorities would obviously prefer to pin the spy ring’s discovery on treason by potentially fictional colonels rather than their own agents’ incompetence. The spies’ use of easily-intercepted Cold War-era burst communications techniques apparently delighted FBI eavesdroppers. And the fact that the network of Russian sleeper agents appeared to be downright comatose over the course of their time in the U.S., with little apparent information collected by 11 agents over the course of several years.
As SpyTalk’s Jeff Stein has reported, the stories of shady defectors may also be part of a campaign to discredit the current head of the SVR and pave the way for Medvedev pal Sergey Naryshkin to take over the spy agency when the Russian president leaves office in 2012.
When the story of Colonel Shcherbakov was leaked to the press, it came complete with threats that he would be hunted down and killed. Colonel Poteyev appears to be the subject of similar intimidation. “This non-person will live a lonely life until the end of his days in fear,” his alleged former colleague Fyodor Yakovlev told the Russian press. ”
Don’t believe the macho talk. If either Shcherbakov or Poteyev exist, Russia isn’t likely to assassinate them. Presuming they’re really under American protection, Russia has too much invested in its thawing relationship with the U.S., from cooperation over a hated U.S. missile shield in Eastern Europe to the New START nuclear weapons treaty. The quick and relatively polite swap of Russian and American spies shows whatever ill will Russia harbors over the incident doesn’t measure up to its recent bluster.
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