Editorial: Espionage has come a long way

Less than a fortnight has passed since the arrest of 10 Russian agents who infiltrated suburban America. But already they are winging their way back to Moscow.

In the biggest spy swap since the Soviet Union collapsed, they have been exchanged for four Russians convicted of betraying their country. The denouement of this episode has, thus, been as startling as the manner in which the agents embedded themselves in ordinary American life for more than a decade while armed with the secret code words, encrypted radio and other paraphernalia of Cold War espionage.

But if their activities smacked of a bygone era, their passage out of the United States said much of a vastly changed world.

Just three days before the arrest of the spies by the FBI, President Barack Obama had a friendly meeting with his Russian counterpart, Dimitry Medvedev, in Washington. Mr Medvedev was praised as a "solid and reliable partner", and the summit appeared to mark a further step forward in a "resetting" of relations with Moscow which, in particular, has delivered progress on nuclear non-proliferation.

The American President enjoys a good rapport with Mr Medvedev, a politician of his own generation. Yet he clearly felt the arrests had to be made to dissuade other countries that might contemplate similar operations.

What followed has been a master-class in damage control. The embarrassment for both countries has been kept to a minimum. In an atmosphere of total pragmatism, diplomatic considerations have totally overpowered judicial niceties.

The confessed Russian agents were not even charged with espionage. Instead, they pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of a foreign country.

This cleared the path for them to be sentenced to time served and ordered out of the US. At least one of the agents was given just 24 hours to agree to the all-or-nothing deportation deal. President Medvedev, for his part, wasted no time signing a decree pardoning four Russian citizens, three of whom had been accused of contacting Western intelligence agencies while working for the Russian or Soviet governments.

The comparison between this incident and similar apprehensions during the Cold War could hardly be more stark.

If diplomatic considerations were also to the fore then, it was in the interests of furthering national interests, not maintaining international relations. The case of Gary Powers, the US spy-plane pilot shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, graphically illustrates the change.

He was interrogated extensively by the KGB for months before making a "voluntary confession" and a public apology to the Soviet people. Thereafter, he was subjected to a show trial, at which he was sentenced to three years' imprisonment followed by seven years' hard labour. He served just over 21 months before being exchanged for a KGB colonel.

Powers' capture was used to the maximum by the Soviet President, Nikita Krushchev. A summit with President Dwight Eisenhower collapsed in large part because the American leader would not bow to the Soviet demand for an apology. The episode deepened a distrust that reached its apogee in the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

At that time, the world held its breath. Almost a half-century on, the response to the discovery of deep-cover agents in the US has caused barely a ripple of concern.

There is only bemusement that such Cold War-style spying should still be being undertaken. Of course, the absence of a trial of any note also precluded revelations about intelligence secrets, which would have shone light on modern espionage practices. No matter.

The rapid resolution of this episode offers its own optimistic commentary.