Priests, pilots and spies: the most notorious exchanges between Moscow and Washington

American basketball player Brittney Greiner was sentenced to nine years in prison by the decision of the Khimki court. She was detained on March 5 while passing through customs control. Poppy oil, which is banned in Russia, was found in his belongings. Criminal cases were opened for two items, smuggling and possession of drugs.

Now the American side raises the question of Greiner’s return to his homeland. On July 27, American media reported that Washington offered to trade him and Paul Whelan, an American convicted of espionage in the Russian Federation, for Russian prisoner Viktor Bout in an American prison.

Press Secretary of the President of the Russian Federation Dmitry Peskov noted that there has not yet been a special agreement between the Russian Federation and the USA on exchange.

Moscow and Washington have been practicing the exchange of citizens for many years since the days of the USSR.

pilot on bully

One of the most high-profile exchanges between Russia and the US took place recently. On April 27, Russian pilot Konstantin Yaroshenko returned to his homeland. He was arrested in Liberia in 2010 and taken to the United States. On September 7, 2011, an American court sentenced him to 20 years in prison for preparing to transport large quantities of drugs.

At the same time, Yaroshenko noted that since the collapse of the USSR he did not carry out any cargo transportation, but worked as an expert on the technical condition of the aircraft. His wife announced that she flew to Liberia to negotiate a cooperation contract.

Yaroshenko was traded for Trevor Reed, an American student convicted in Russia in 2020.

Reed attacked law enforcement in Moscow while intoxicated in 2019. In 2020, the court sentenced him to nine years in prison, transferred to one of the Mordovian colonies. The court also collected from him 200 thousand rubles. as non-pecuniary damages in favor of the two injured policemen.

Chapman at Skripal

Another high-profile exchange of the 21st century between the US and Russia took place on July 9, 2010. At Vienna airport that day, Moscow exchanged four Russian citizens for ten people arrested in the United States on charges of engaging in illegal activities in favor of Russia. American law enforcement officials accused Anna Chapman, Richard and Cynthia Murphy, Juan Lazaro and Vicky Pelaez, Michael Zotolli, Patricia Mills, Mikhail Semenko, Donald Howard Heathfield and Tracey Lee Ann Foley of spying. The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs admitted that the Russians were among them.

Head of the Department of the US and Canadian Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences Igor Sutyagin, former deputy head of the security service of the NTV Plus television company Gennady Vasilenko and former employees of the Foreign Intelligence Service and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. GRU, Alexander Zaporozhsky and Sergei Skripal traveled to the United States from Russia.

Soviet spy of the Soviet scientist

1986 was a fruitful year for exchanges between the USA and the then USSR. On February 11, the Soviet side exchanged the Czechoslovak intelligence officers of the spouses of Karl and Hannah Köcher, arrested in New York, two FRG citizens of the Soviet intelligence officer Yevgeny, and the dissident Natan Sharansky, a Czechoslovak citizen collaborating with American intelligence. Zemlyakov, Pole Jerzy Kaczmarek and German Detlef Scharfenort.

In the same year, on October 5, the intelligence officer of the USSR and the USA replaced an American journalist, Gennady Zakharov, an employee of the Soviet mission at the UN, and Nicholas Danilov, a correspondent for the US News and World Report. Both were charged with espionage.

As part of the same agreement, Soviet physicist Yuri Orlov, founder of the Moscow Helsinki Group, was deported to the United States. He was arrested in 1977 and sentenced to seven years in prison and five years in exile under Article 70 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR “Anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”. The release and expulsion of the scientist was the result of negotiations between Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan. Orlov was deprived of Soviet citizenship and forcibly expelled from the country. He became a professor at Cornell University in 1986.

five to two

Another famous exchange, as in the case of Yaroshenko, took place on April 27, 1979. Then, the Soviet authorities extradited Valdik Enger and Rudolf Chernyaev, two Soviet intelligence officers acting under the auspices of the UN secretariat, in exchange they released Alexander Ginzburg, Valentin Moroz, Georgy Vins, Mark Dymshits and Eduard Kuznetsov from prison and sent them to the military. United States of America.

Enger and Chernyaev were detained in May 1978 while trying to retrieve classified documents from their hiding place. They were sentenced to 50 years in prison.

Two of the five dissidents in the USSR were convicted of trying to hijack a plane bound for Sweden in May 1970, the rest were accused of anti-Soviet activities.

Soviet agents of an American priest

The exchange of two people from both sides of the United States and the USSR took place on October 11, 1963. Two Soviet agents arrested in the United States – a former UN Secretariat employee Ivan Yegorov and his wife Alexandra – were replaced by the American priest Walter Cishek, who was convicted in 1941 on espionage charges. Father Walter spent almost 23 years in Soviet prisons and camps.

Abel on Powers

The first high-profile intelligence officer exchange took place on February 10, 1962.

On that day, at the Glienik bridge connecting the GDR and West Berlin, Soviet intelligence officer Rudolf Abel was replaced by five US citizens, including the pilot Francis Powers, who was shot down during a reconnaissance flight near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg).

Abel (real name and surname William Fisher) has been in the United States since 1948, where he carried out the task of determining the degree of probability of a military conflict with this state, creating illegal channels of communication and obtaining information about the economic situation. and military potential.

He named himself Rudolf Abel upon his arrest on June 21, 1957. In fact, it was the name of his friend, who by that time was already dead. On November 15 of the same year, an American court sentenced him to 32 years in prison.

Soviet intelligence waged a long-term struggle for the release of Abel, speeding up after an American U-2 reconnaissance aircraft led by pilot Francis Gary Powers was shot down in the Sverdlovsk area on May 1, 1960. He himself was parachuted and after landing, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison.

On the day of Abel and Powers’ exchange, the USSR would also hand over to the United States Yale student Frederick Pryor, who was arrested for espionage in East Berlin in August 1961, and Marvin Makinen, a young American from the University of Pennsylvania. He is in prison in Kyiv for espionage. Pryor was transferred the same day, while Makinen was transferred a month later.

After returning to Moscow, Fischer was sent for treatment and rest, after which he continued to work in the central apparatus of foreign intelligence. He died in 1971 at the age of 68.

Powers worked as a test pilot in his home country and then flew in a television company helicopter. He died in a helicopter crash he was piloting in August 1977 while returning from filming the Los Angeles area wildfires.