Life After Espionage: What Happens to Exposed Spies?

What fate awaits the spy whose cover has been exposed? According to Politico, some spies are too important to be left by their bosses to rot in a foreign prison after being captured, and they are released in exchange. In other cases, spy hunters are reluctant to consider a trade because the treason has been so great that a long prison sentence seems deserved.

And there are unnecessary people, the paper notes, who are so low-ranking that their bosses don’t care what happens to them once they’re exposed, and are too insignificant to consider a spy swap.

After espionage hit the headlines again when three Bulgarian nationals were indicted in Britain as part of an investigation into an alleged Russian spy ring, Politico looks at how those accused have fared in the past after being exposed.

A life in splendor

For Anna Vasilievna Kushchenko (a.k.a. Anna Chapman), the former Russian “sleeper agent” whose fire-colored hair took American and British tabloids by storm, life after espionage was lucrative and she was swept up in a whirlwind of fashion shows, television and business opportunities.

Chapman, who took her last name from a Briton she briefly married, was greeted with celebrations on her return home after being traded more than a decade ago in the biggest spy swap since the end of the Cold War.

The United States released 10 Russians, including Chapman, and the Kremlin handed over Sergei Skripal, a Russian spy convicted of spying for Britain, and three others.

She and her fellow “sleeper agents” met Vladimir Putin on their arrival in Russia and reportedly sang patriotic songs together. Many have since landed well-paid jobs as consultants to state-owned companies, but Chapman has caught the eye of the Kremlin, which wants to promote her to Putin as the “Bond girl” of the poster.

Initially, she was appointed as an advisor to the CEO of a Russian bank. But then she became a catwalk model, fashion designer, TV presenter and entrepreneur.

Andrei Bezrukov, known in the US as Donald Heathfield, who returned to Russia on the same exchange, reincarnated as an academician at the University of International Relations in Moscow.

I miss home

Three of the infamous Cambridge Five – Kim Philby, Guy Burgess and Donald McLain – managed to evade capture and escape to Moscow. Their role as double agents is still troubling British intelligence, as all three were members of the British upper class, considered completely trustworthy.

They did deep and lasting damage to British intelligence by handing over thousands of top-secret documents, warning of possible Russian defectors and giving the names of those working for the British and Americans across the Iron Curtain.

Unlike Chapman, none of them led glamorous lives in the gray Soviet Union. Philby was frustrated by the fact that the KGB did not trust him for many years and did not employ him. For the first few years he was effectively kept under house arrest. His closest KGB contact, Mikhail Lyubimov, who ran KGB bureaus in Britain and Denmark during the Cold War, later revealed that the Russians feared Philby would flee back to Britain out of boredom and nostalgia. at home.

It was probably not an unfounded fear, as Philby missed cricket and the high-end stores of Harrods and Fortnum & Mason. He was later given a minor role in training new KGB recruits and was allowed to write a censored memoir. Burgess and McLain have also struggled to adapt to life in the former Soviet Union.

Burgess’s profligate lifestyle, fueled by alcohol, had become increasingly disorderly. McLain was more disciplined and involved in the former Soviet Union, serving as a specialist on Western economic policy and British foreign affairs. But he too has fallen into heavy drinking, and his wife Melinda briefly left him for Philby before returning to the West.

The extra ones

The country you risked your freedom for may not always come to your aid, especially if you haven’t been able to wash away any of their own dirt.

British embassy guard David Ballantyne Smith, a native of Paisley in Scotland, is currently serving a 13-year sentence after being found guilty of spying for Russia. He copied classified documents he found in unlocked filing cabinets and on desks in the Berlin embassy where he worked.

Left to rot in jail

In the 1990s, US authorities arrested Aldrich Ames of the CIA and Robert Hansen of the FBI. Hansen spied for the Soviet and Russian intelligence services from 1979 to 2001, and his betrayal was described by prosecutors as “perhaps the worst intelligence disaster in US history.” He has sold thousands of top-secret documents on US nuclear strategies, the development of military weapons technology and US counterintelligence programs.

Ames had provided the names of KGB agents working undercover for Washington who were executed when discovered. There was talk of including them in a spy swap, but the Russians didn’t have spies of the same caliber to swap. Moreover, their treachery was so heinous, according to the American services, that they did not deserve to be exchanged.

From 2002 until his death in June this year at the age of 79, Hansen was in a maximum-security prison in the state of Colorado, where he was held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day.

Ames, now 82, is serving a life sentence in a medium-security prison in the state of Indiana.

It’s a mystery

Not everyone gets arrested. The two Russians suspected of carrying out the Salisbury poisoning in 2018 appeared on Russian state television after being identified as suspects. They became famous for visiting the “beautiful” English city as tourists to see its cathedral. A BBC report from 2021 said they had not been seen since.
(Svetoslav Tanchev from BTA)

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2023-08-20 18:02:00
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