Russian spy arrests evoke Cold War

• Source: Global Times
• [02:51 June 30 2010]
• Comments

According to the complaints, the FBI's investigation revealed that the network was trying to become sufficiently "Americanized" to gather information about the US for Russia and to infiltrate the US policy-making circles.

The complaints list some "covert acts" by the alleged agents. For instance, during 2004, a defendant named "Donald Howard Heathfield" met with an employee of the US government with regard to nuclear weapons research.

"The magnitude, and the fact that so many illegals were involved, was a shock to me," Oleg D. Kalugin, a former KGB general who was a Soviet spy in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s under "legal" cover as a diplomat and Radio Moscow correspondent, told The New York Times.

"It's a return to the old days, but even in the worst years of the Cold War, I think there were no more than 10 illegals in the US, probably fewer," he was quoted as saying.

The announcement came only a few days after Medvedev's visit to the US. The arrests will come as a "severe embarrassment to Dmitry Medvedev," The Times commented Tuesday.

Ties between the two former Cold War rivals had improved recently, evidenced by the signing of an agreement to reduce the two countries' stockpiles of nuclear weapons and the passing of new UN sanctions against Iran over its disputed nuclear program.

Xia Yishan, a researcher at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times that he didn't believe US-Russia relations would be greatly affected by the arrests.

"It was neither a deliberate arrangement by the US' top decision maker nor a barometer of US-Russia ties," Xia said, adding that the matter was an independent incident.

But Wang Lijiu, at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (CICIR), noted that there was a political motive behind the arrests.

"The conservatives in the US are obviously not happy with closer US-Russia relations, and they wanted to put the brake on it by exposing the spy ring," Wang said.

Wang added that Russia is likely to make similar arrests of US intelligence agents as retaliation, but would avoid overreacting to the matter.

Li Wei, director of the Institute of Security and Strategic Studies at CICIR, said that "spying seems to be a public secret for nations," as it has been widely adopted by governments to collect information from overseas.

Kang Juan and agencies contributed to this story