Not so cold, but there's still work for spies

The spy exchange unfolding in Moscow, New York and points between evokes a bygone era when cold war teetered on the verge of hot, superpowers sniffed out each other's deadliest secrets, and the swaps even had a ringmaster in a dapper German communist.

Vladimir Bukovsky, a Russian freed in a 1976 exchange, expressed surprise yesterday at the Cold War rerun, saying trading prisoners should be a thing of the past.

"It's a bit sad that everything in the world seems to end up like a blind donkey going around in circles," the 67-year-old former Soviet dissident said in London.

But the parallels go only so far. Espionage's new wave does not quite measure up to the old. Where the Kremlin's daring agents of earlier generations ferreted out atomic bomb blueprints and infiltrated Nato planning councils, the hapless 10 of 2010 are accused of foraging for White House "kitchen rumours" and US policy chatter.

And where the current swap candidates are obscure US suburbanites and ineffectual operatives, the trades of that earlier time involved notorious spymasters and celebrated political prisoners.

In the last of those headline-making swaps, in a divided Berlin on a grey Tuesday in February 24 years ago, one of the Soviet Union's best-known dissidents, Anatoly Shcharansky, emerged from nine years' imprisonment to walk across the snow-covered Glienicke Bridge to freedom - and eventually, as Natan Sharansky, to a life as an Israeli politician. The human rights activist was part of a trade also involving five alleged Soviet-bloc spies and three Westerners held in the East.

During the 45-minute exchange on the green steel bridge over the Havel River, separating West Berlin from East Germany, a balding, bespectacled man in a stylish suit and a white Mercedes drove up from the eastern side and met the prisoners.

That affluent intermediary was the late Wolfgang Vogel, a lawyer from communist East Germany who over three decades was instrumental in brokering both spy swaps and the larger-scale exit of ordinary people from East Germany, in exchange for West German government payments. Twenty-four years earlier, in 1962, Vogel had engineered an even more spectacular - and secret - swap on the same bridge: the exchange of US spy-plane pilot Francis Powers, shot down over the heart of the Soviet Union, for a Soviet spy known as Rudolf Abel, who for more than a decade posed as a New York artist while running an undercover ring of spies who passed on US atom-bomb secrets.

Over the years, Vogel was the go-between for the exchange of more than 150 spies and alleged spies. In 1985, the year before Mr Shcharansky's release, he negotiated a mass swap of 23 alleged spies held by his own government for four East German agents convicted in the US.

Through the decades of Cold War, through the ups and downs of detente and crisis, such prisoner exchanges became almost routine.

In 1964, at West Berlin's Heerstrasse crossing to East Germany, British businessman Greville Maynard Wynne, who was at the heart of a sensational Moscow spy case, was exchanged for Konon Trofimovich Molody, whose spy ring had collected data on British submarines.

Wynne was the conduit for Oleg Penkovsky, a key Russian agent for Britain's MI6 who later was executed.

When Bukovsky was released in 1976 and flown in handcuffs to Switzerland, it was in exchange for Chilean communist leader Luis Corvalan, imprisoned by dictator General Augusto Pinochet after Chile's right-wing military coup of 1973.

Profiles

Anna Chapman
Ms Chapman, a Manhattan resident who was married to a British man, is the daughter of a Russian diplomat. Photos of the redhead that showcased her social life and travels were splashed all over the tabloids and she was branded a femme fatale.

Her lawyer Robert Baum said she had visited the United States on and off since 2005 before settling in Manhattan to start a business that is worth £1.3 million.

Prosecutors said Ms Chapman would use a specially configured laptop computer to transmit messages to another computer of an unnamed Russian official.

She was arrested at a New York Police Department precinct after turning in a fake passport an undercover FBI agent had given to her. She pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country. Ms Chapman is her married name; she is now divorced. Her maiden name is Kushchenko.

Tracey Foley
Ms Foley lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is married to Donald Howard Heathfield. The couple has two sons, Tim, 20, a student at George Washington University in Washington DC, and Alex 16, a student at the International School of Boston.

Ms Foley was an estate agent who showed houses in the Boston area. She worked on a contract basis for the real estate brokerage Redfin.

She pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country. Her real name is Elena Vavilova.

Donald Heathfield
Mr Heathfield lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is married to Tracey Foley. He graduated from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government with a master's degree in public administration in 2000.

Mr Heathfield worked as a sales consultant at Global Partners, a Cambridge-based international consulting and management development firm. He also had his own consulting company, Future Map Strategic Advisory Services. Prosecutors said Mr Heathfield met an employee of the US government in 2004 to discuss nuclear weapons research. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country. His real name is Andrey Bezrukov.

Juan Lazaro
Photographer Juan Lazaro said he was born in Uruguay and was a Peruvian citizen. He studied at the New School for Social Research, now called The New School, a university in Manhattan. He taught a class on Latin American and Caribbean politics at Baruch College, also in Manhattan, for a short time in 2008.

But prosecutors said he admitted that the name Juan Lazaro was fake, that he was not born in the South American country and that he was not a citizen of Peru. His real name is Mikhail Anatonljevich.

They also say he has admitted that his wife, Vicky Pelaez, passed letters to the Russian intelligence service on his behalf and that his home in Yonkers, New York, had been paid for by Russian intelligence. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country.

Christopher Metsos
Mr Metsos is the suspected paymaster for the US spy ring. He was arrested June 29 in Cyprus on an Interpol warrant as he tried to board a flight for Budapest, Hungary. Released on £22,000 bail a day later, he promptly disappeared and is now a fugitive. Canadian authorities said he was travelling as a 54-year-old tourist on a Canadian passport that stole the identity of a boy who died at the age of five. He has been charged with conspiring to act as a foreign agent and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Authorities have not released any other identity for him.

Patricia Mills
Ms Mills is the assumed name for Natalia Pereverzeva, living in the US with Mikhail Kutsik, who used the name Michael Zottoli. Like Mr Kutsik, she held a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Washington, obtained in 2006.

Neighbours describe the two as a smiling, attractive couple raising a young son and toddler in an Arlington, Virginia, high-rise apartment.

They moved to northern Virginia last year from Seattle. The two children are being cared for by family friends on the West Coast at the couple's request, according to Arlington County social services. She pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country.

Richard Murphy
Mr Murphy, with his wife, Cynthia, are the parents of two daughters, Kate, 11, and Lisa, nine. The family, who lived in a suburban neighbourhood in Montclair, New Jersey, had been in the US since the 1990s.

Neighbours say Richard mostly stayed home with the children, caring for them and the home, while his wife had a well-paid job in New York City. Born Vladimir Guryev, he pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country.

Cynthia Murphy
Married to Richard Murphy, the couple lived in a suburban neighbourhood in Montclair with their daughters. Concealing her true name - Lydia Guryev - she worked for Morea Financial Services, a lower Manhattan-based accounting firm that offered tax advice, earning £89,000 a year, and had recently earned her MBA.

Robert Baum, the lawyer representing another defendant in the case, Anna Chapman, has said that Cynthia Murphy was being held in isolation, claims on which prison officials have declined to comment. She pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country.

Vicky Pelaez
Married to Juan Lazaro, Ms Pelaez was born in Peru. She worked in New York City as a columnist for one of the US' best-known Spanish-language newspapers, El Diario La Prensa.

Ms Pelaez turned her 1984 kidnapping by a left-wing guerrilla group in Peru into a chance to get an interview with one of its leaders.

A magistrate judge last week had approved a £166,000 bail package for Ms Pelaez, but the government is appealing and US citizen Ms Pelaez was ordered to remain in detention until that appeal is heard.

The couple have a teen son, Juan Lazaro, a gifted pianist. Ms Pelaez also has a 38-year-old son from a previous marriage.

She pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country. Ms Pelaez is her real name.

Mikhail Semenko
Mr Semenko of Arlington, Virginia, worked at the Travel All Russia travel agency in Arlington leading up to his arrest. Mr Semenko attended Amur State University on Russia's border with China, where he was enrolled in a Chinese studies program. It was there he met Slava Shirokov, owner of the travel agency that eventually employed Mr Semenko.

After arriving in the US, he received a graduate degree from Seton Hall University in New Jersey. Ms Shirokov said Mr Semenko liked to attend functions at the Russian embassy and talked about landing a job in international relations. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country. Semenko is his real name.

Michael Zottoli
Mr Zottoli is the assumed name for Mikhail Kutsik, who was living as part of a married couple with Natalia Pereverzeva, purporting to be Patricia Mills. In Seattle, he worked at Premier Global Services, a telecommunications firm, from 2007 to 2009.

Mr Zottoli earned a bachelor's degree in business administration from the University of Washington in 2006. He and Ms Mills moved to northern Virginia last year. After his arrest, he and his purported wife admitted that Mr Zottoli and Ms Mills were assumed names and provided their real names, which had not been known at the time of their arrest. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign country. The couple have two young children.