Despite Arrests, Working to Rebuild Russia Ties
By PETER BAKER
Published: June 30, 2010
WASHINGTON — They doffed their jackets and bonded over burgers, talking about everything from trade and geopolitics to their families. Everything, that is, except the spies that the government of one had hidden in a house just a few miles away and that the government of the other was about to arrest.
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Times Topics: Russian Spy Ring (2010) | Espionage
The roundup of a suspected Russian spy ring did more than disrupt a years-old deep-cover operation inside the United States — it cast a shadow overPresident Obama’s effort to transform the relationship between the two countries. The timing of the arrests, coming barely 72 hours after President Dmitri A. Medvedev’s White House visit, frustrated Mr. Obama’s team. But as prosecutors assemble their case, Mr. Obama has resolved not to let the ghosts of the 20th century get in the way of his goals in the 21st.
Mr. Obama’s administration said Wednesday that it would not expel Russian diplomats and it expressed no indignation that its putative partner was spying on it. Mr. Obama’s plan is to largely ignore the issue publicly, leaving it to diplomats and investigators to handle, while he moves on to what he sees as more important matters.
“We would like to get to the point where there is just so much trust and cooperation between the United States and Russia that nobody would think of turning to intelligence means to find out things that they couldn’t find out in other channels,” Philip Gordon, the assistant secretary of state in charge of Russia, told reporters. “We’re apparently not there yet. I don’t think anyone in this room is shocked to have discovered that.”
But the spy scandal could embolden critics who argue that Mr. Obama has been overly optimistic about his capacity to reset a relationship freighted by longstanding suspicion and clashing interests. The episode could complicate Mr. Obama’s efforts to persuade the Senate to approve the new arms control treaty he negotiated with Mr. Medvedev.
“It ought to reset our rosy view of Russia and remind us that Russia is not a trustworthy ally,” Senator Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the ranking Republican on the Senate intelligence committee, said in an interview. Harking back to Ronald Reagan’s approach, Mr. Bond said: “We have to deal with them. But wasn’t there a great president who said, ‘Trust but verify’?”
Even if Mr. Obama can assuage doubts on the treaty, the scandal has underscored the limits of the new relationship.
“The spy scandal is unlikely to derail the reset because both sides have too much invested in the success of the current agenda,” said Angela E. Stent, a former National Intelligence Council official now at Georgetown University. “But it is a cautionary reminder that the U.S.-Russian relationship remains a selective partnership where cold war legacies persist.”
Part of the problem for Mr. Obama is that his desire to redefine the relationship has been misinterpreted as an effort to redefine Russia itself, said Samuel Charap, a scholar at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research organization close to the White House. “It’s a reminder that yes, Russia is still Russia and Putin is still Putin,” he said of the spy case, referring to Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. colonel. “None of that is Obama’s fault. The intention was never to reset Russia.”
It should come as little surprise, of course, that the two countries still spy on each other two decades after the end of the cold war. Even close allies like Israel have been caught spying here. Recent history shows that Washington and Moscow have been able to get past such moments when they were determined to pursue other agendas.
George W. Bush faced such a challenge at the start of his presidency with the arrest ofRobert Hanssen, a longtime F.B.I. agent caught working for Russia. Mr. Bush kicked out 50 Russian diplomats and Moscow did the same to 50 American diplomats. But three months later, he met Mr. Putin, then president, and declared that he had seen the soul of a partner he could work with.
This case should be easier to overcome without tit-for-tat expulsions because the suspected spy ring did not seem to achieve any serious breach of national security. As Leon Aron, a Russian expert at the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative research organization, noted: “The relationship survived Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. That was serious stuff and everybody rolled with the punches.”
Russian leaders appear interested in playing down the situation. Although Moscow initially called the charges “baseless,” the Foreign Ministry later took that statement off its Web site and confirmed that the suspects were Russian citizens. Mr. Putin said the American authorities had gotten out of control in making the arrests, but then minimized it by saying relations “will not suffer.” Much of the Russian commentary suggested that the arrests were an effort by dark forces in the American government to undermine Mr. Obama’s reset policy.
In a telephone call between Sergei Prikhodko, Mr. Medvedev’s foreign policy adviser, and Gen. James L. Jones, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser, the Russian emphasized that Moscow wanted to resolve the issue without jeopardizing positive changes in the relationship, people briefed on the call said.
“The timing of this was obviously a bit awkward,” coming just after Mr. Medvedev’s visit, said Andrew C. Kuchins, a Russia scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But, he said, “we have a fair amount of history of delinking spy scandals from the rest of Russia policy.”
Suspect Disappears in Cyprus
ATHENS — The 11th suspect in the Russian spy ring case has disappeared on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where he was arrested but released on bail Tuesday.
Late Wednesday, a police spokesman told the Cyprus state news agency that the suspect, Christopher Metsos, 54, had failed to report as required to a precinct in the island’s southwest, where he had been apprehended. The police obtained a warrant for his arrest and a manhunt was under way.
Mr. Metsos, who is accused of being the spy ring’s paymaster, was arrested early Tuesday at the airport in the southern city of Larnaca as he was about to fly to Budapest.
In a move that dismayed American law enforcement authorities, a local court ordered his release on bail of around $25,000 on the condition that he surrender his passport while arrangements were made for his extradition to the United States.
NIKI KITSANTONIS
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