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MOSCOW — The head of Moscow's deep cover spying operations in the United States was a double agent who had betrayed at least 10 compatriots in a major blow to Russian intelligence, a Russian newspaper said on Thursday.
Kommersant reported that Colonel Shcherbakov, head of the Foreign Intelligence Service's department for "illegal" spying operations in the United States, had been working for Washington.
Quoting intelligence sources, the newspaper says Col Shcherbakov fled to America in June, just three days before President Dmitry Medvedev's official visit to the US.
A few days after that, once the Russian president was back in the Kremlin, the Russian agents were seized.
"We know who he is and where he is," the Kremlin official was quoted as saying.
"Do not doubt that a Mercader has been sent after him already," the Kremlin official said, referring to Russian agent Ramon Mercader, who murdered exiled Bolshevik Leon Trotsky with an ice axe in 1940 in Mexico.
The conflict has resulted in the assassination of several INIS officers, mostly by their colleagues in the Service, according to two anonymous Iraqi security officials, who spoke to The National, an English-language newspaper published in the United Arab Emirates. One of them, a brigadier-general with recent experience in intelligence work in Baghdad, told the paper that Shiite INIS officers are beeing killed by professionally trained assassins using “plastic explosives, sticky bombs and silenced pistols”. These killings, said the brigadier-general, are conveniently reported as random terrorist attacks against Iraqi government employees. Another intelligence source told The National that the killings are targeted and involve the use of inside information, including pen-register data of cell phones belonging to spies targeted for assassination.
Speaking shortly after the agents' return to Moscow, Russia's prime minister, Vladimir Putin, said the traitor who had betrayed them had been identified.
"It was the result of treason," he said, predicting a grim future for those responsible. "It always ends badly for traitors: as a rule, their end comes from drink or drugs, lying in the gutter. And for what?"