President Dmitry Medvedev yesterday handed top state honours to the Russian spies deported from the United States in July in the biggest spy scandal since the Cold War, the Kremlin said.
“A ceremony took place in the Kremlin today to hand top state honours to a number of Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) employees, including the spies who were working in the United States and returned to Russia in July,” Kremlin spokesman Natalya Timakova said in a statement on Russian news agencies.
No television footage or pictures have so far been released of the ceremony, which came on the same day as Mr Medvedev received the credentials of new foreign ambassadors.
The group of 10 spies, many of whom had been working for years undercover in the United States as sleeper agents, returned to Russia in a sensational spy swap that saw Moscow send four Russian convicts to the West.
The group included the glamorous Anna Chapman, who became a figure of international notoriety and mysteriously resurfaced earlier this month at a space launch at the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Ms Chapman was snapped by photographers outside the astronauts’ hotel, but was swiftly led away by guards.
She wrote on her Facebook page that she visited the launch of the Soyuz rocket, carrying astronauts to the International Space Station, because of “pride for my motherland and humanity in general.”
A Russian bank linked with the country’s space programme last week said it had hired Ms Chapman to work as an advisor to its president, praising her as a “creative and multi-faceted employee who truly cares about Russia’s destiny.”
While Ms Chapman has not yet given any interviews, she has appeared in a magazine photoshoot in a central Moscow hotel in clingy cocktail dresses and attended a party organised by the Russian edition of Maxim magazine.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who served as a KGB agent in East Germany, has said that he has met the spies and even sung patriotic songs with them. He blamed “traitors” for blowing their cover.
“This was the result of treason and traitors always end badly. They finish up as drunks, addicts, on the street,” said Mr Putin.
The Russian media and a number of ex-KGB spies slammed the shoddy and apparently antiquated spycraft of the 10, who were working for the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), a successor of the Soviet KGB.
They criticised them for openly posting on social networking sites such as Facebook and using apparently archaic techniques like invisible ink.
US officials said that the spy network had never managed to gather intelligence and pass on any classified information even though some members worked in the United States for more than a decade.
The spies were exchanged for four Russians, including arms researcher Igor Sutyagin, who was convicted for 11 years of handing classified information to a British company that Russia believed was a CIA cover, and is now in Britain.
Prof. Sutyagin’s relatives were the first to break the news of the spy swap after he agreed to a deal in which he admitted his guilt in return for a pardon.
Russia’s top state honour, the order of Holy Apostle Andrei the First Called, is awarded for deeds that have “really out-standing state, public or international significance”, according to the government website.