Yesterday’s exchange of prisoners at Ankara airport in Turkey will have been personally ordered by President Putin. He is a veteran of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police agency, and no doubt aware of the role that swapping agents with the West has played in the troubled history of superpower rivalry. Putin knows that Russian spies look after their own – especially as the Chekists concerned are killers with blood on their hands. Vadim Krasikov, the hitman freed yesterday, was jailed in Germany in 2019 for murdering an exiled Chechen in a Berlin park.
Vladimir Putin is as tenacious in exacting revenge on traitors to Russia as he is in protecting his own agents
The trouble with these ‘spy swaps’ is that they always benefit Russia more than the West. They place the same value on the lives of innocents jailed in Russia, like the Wall Street Journal correspondent Evan Gershkovich, as Moscow’s trained professional spies and killers such as Krasikov. This means that any westerner based in Putin’s police state is permanently in peril of being arrested and jailed as a pawn in a deadly power play between the competing West and East.
Look at the case of Gerald Brooke, an English innocent abroad. Brooke was a Russian language teacher jailed in 1965 for smuggling Christian literature into the Soviet Union. Brooke spent four years in a gulag before being freed in 1969 in exchange for Helen and Peter Kroger (real names Morris and Lona Cohen), a married couple working as KGB agents in Britain. They lived undercover as second-hand book dealers in a suburban bungalow in Ruislip.
The Brooke-Kroger swap was part of a larger story. The Krogers were members of the Portland spy ring, extracting British maritime secrets at the Isle of Portland Royal Navy base with Britons Harry Houghton and Ethel Gee, a traitorous couple who worked at the base. The Portland ring was broken up in 1961, and its members were tried and jailed. The ring was run by Russian KGB spymaster Konon Molody, posing in London as a Canadian businessman called Gordon Lonsdale.
In jail in Birmingham, Molody/Lonsdale was befriended by the Great Train Robbers, but he was not to stay behind bars for long. In 1964, he was swapped for Greville Wynne, a British MI6 agent who had been travelling behind the Iron Curtain, posing as a businessman showing his wares at industrial exhibitions. In reality, Wynne had been working as the link man to Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, a senior KGB officer operating as a double agent, who was the West’s most influential spy in Russia during the Cold War, and betrayed secrets to the West because he detested the dictatorial Soviet system.
The information given by Penkovsky to Britain and the US during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis played a major part in saving the world from nuclear destruction, but he was viewed as a traitor by Moscow and executed for treason in 1963. Both the story of the Portland spies and the career of Wynn have been portrayed in films, with the Portland story told as Ring of Spies in 1964, and Benedict Cumberbatch giving a powerful performance as Wynn in The Courier in 2020.
Yesterday’s swap in the Turkish capital comes too late for those like opposition leader Alexei Navalny who died in Russian captivity before he could be exchanged. But the swap, negotiated despite relations between Russia and the West being in the deep freeze over the Ukraine war, proves what high value Putin places on the lives of his spies. (Both Abel and Molody were honoured by being portrayed on Russian postage stamps, along with the notorious British spy and traitor Kim Philby.)
Vladimir Putin is as tenacious in exacting revenge on traitors to Russia as he is in protecting his own agents. In 2004, Sergei Skripal, like Penkovsky, a Russian Intelligence officer recruited by Britain as a double agent, was arrested in Moscow and sentenced to 13 years in jail. In 2010 he was freed with three other Russians jailed for spying for the West, in exchange for ten Russians jailed for spying in the US. Then the Salisbury attacks happened…
The Skripals survived, but an innocent woman, Dawn Sturgess, who mistook the Novichok for perfume in a bottle discarded by the Russians, died. The Skripal case caused a major diplomatic incident, with scores of Russian ‘diplomats’ expelled from embassies both in Britain and across Europe. The latest move in what Rudyard Kipling called the ‘Great Game’ of espionage between East and West shows that both sides play for high stakes, and the penalty for those caught up can be fatal.
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