Anna Chapman
(2 of 2)
Indeed, little seems more valuable in the arena of Russian politics than a background in espionage. Scores of ministers and deputies in the Russian parliament have had ties to the secret service, and Putin himself served as a KGB agent in East Germany during the Cold War. In his time in office, first as President and now as Prime Minister, he has worked to restore the prestige of Russia's intelligence agencies to make them more attractive to new recruits and less ominous to the everyday Russian.
For some observers, this helps explain the nostalgic pleasure Putin seemed to take in welcoming the spies back home. One of the songs they sang was an unofficial anthem of the secret services called "What Does the Motherland Start With?" It's the theme song from an old Soviet TV show that was almost as whimsical in its depiction of spies as Putin was on Saturday. "Just imagine," he said to reporters. "You have to learn a foreign language as if it was your native tongue. You have to think in it, speak in it and execute all the tasks set by the Motherland ... Your own children don't even know what you do!"
Such praise for Chapman and her cohorts came as a surprise to Oleg Nechiporenko, a former KGB colonel whose cover was blown in 1971 when he was accused of supporting leftist radicals in Mexico. Nechiporenko says the spies he worked with then were of far higher caliber than those busted by the FBI last month, and many former agents have publicly said that some of the slipups exposed by the FBI were downright humiliating. In perhaps the most famous example, Chapman registered a cell phone using a fake Russian name and the address 99 Fake St., then threw the receipt into a public trash bin, where the FBI picked it up, according to the bureau's affidavit.
Despite the mistakes, Nechiporenko says, some kind of reception would still need to be part of a spy's reintegration. "For me, there was a banquet, there were medals, promotions, and of course I got a raise," Nechiporenko says. "This is all part of the tradition if you're exposed by no fault of your own." Part of the reason for the festivities, he adds, is to smooth a spy's path up the official hierarchy and make everyone aware that he or she deserves respect.
Yet Lyubimov says Putin went further than usual in this case. To have the most powerful man in the country sing songs and celebrate with a group of agents and then discuss it publicly, "that is something new," he says. "That shows a new respect for the role of the foreign-intelligence service that I haven't seen before. And it probably indicates the attention and care these individuals will get now that they've returned to the motherland." Whether this means the ex-spies will have new careers in politics or spycraft, Putin seems to have taken a personal interest in making their futures as cozy as possible.