The head of Russia's deep cover US spying operations has betrayed the network and defected, a Russian paper has reported, potentially giving the West one of its biggest intelligence coups since the end of the Cold War.
The newspaper, Kommersant, named the man as Col Shcherbakov, and said he was responsible for unmasking a Russian spy ring in the United States in June whose arrests humiliated Moscow and clouded a "reset" in ties with Washington.
The betrayal would make Col Shcherbakov one of the most senior turncoats since the fall of the Soviet Union and could have consequences for Russia's proud Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) and its chief, former prime minister Mikhail Fradkov.
Kommersant said Col Shcherbakov - whose first name it did not give - had been responsible for "illegal spying" in the United States, meaning spies operating under deep cover without diplomatic immunity.
"There has never been such a failure by Section S, the American department that Shcherbakov directed," said Gennady Gudkov, deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's security committee, confirming that Kommersant's report was accurate.
The paper said Col Shcherbakov had left Russia days before US authorities announced the spy ring arrests on June 28th - and quoted a Kremlin official as saying a Russian hit squad was probably already planning to kill him.
"We know who he is and where he is," the unidentified official was quoted as saying. "Do not doubt that a Mercader has been sent after him already."
Ramon Mercader was the Russian agent who murdered exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky with an ice axe in Mexico in 1940.
All the 10 spies arrested in the United States pleaded guilty and were deported to Russia in a spy swap less than two weeks later.
Prime minister Vladimir Putin, himself a former KGB spy, greeted them as heroes. He said traitors came to a bad end, and that the informer would be left to the mercy of his own kind. "The special services live by their own laws, and everyone knows what these laws are," he said.
Reuters