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.
Gennady Gudkov, a member of the Russian parliament's national security committee, later confirmed the report. "Shcherbakov turned over our agents in the U.S.A.," he said. "I knew of this long before the publication today in Kommersant."
The article listed red flags that the newspaper's sources said should have been investigated, including that he had a daughter living in the United States and a son who left his government anti-narcotics job shortly before the spy scandal broke. Additionally, Shcherbakov turned down a promotion, which might have involved taking a lie detector test, about a year before the spy ring's discovery.
The newspaper said Shcherbakov — it did not give his first name — had been spirited out of Moscow to the United States days before the FBI announced in June that it had arrested the members of a Russian spy ring.
The group included the flame-haired Anna Chapman, who skyrocketed to global fame after posting sultry pictures of herself on social media sites, posing provocatively for magazines and making public appearances in Russia.
U.S. officials deported the 10 Russian agents who had infiltrated suburban America in exchange for four people convicted in Russia of spying for the West. The spies received a hero's welcome in Russia, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin leading them in a patriotic singalong in July.
But Kommersant quoted an unidentified official in the Kremlin administration as saying, in a comment reminiscent of spying in the Cold War era, that a Russian hit squad was probably already planning to kill him.
"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.
Spy swap
A spokesman for Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), asked to comment on the Kommersant report, said "We have no comment on this and will not have any."
"What I can say is that the press center of the SVR did not give any of this to Kommersant," said SVR spokesman Sergei Ivanov.
The CIA, for its part, said it would have no comment on the Kommersant report.
In June, the United States announced it had broken a spy ring that had been operating in the United States for 10 years, its members adopting false identities and blending into their surroundings while they tried to gather intelligence for Moscow.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin later condemned the traitor he said had betrayed the Russian agents, and President Dmitry Medvedev decorated the spies for their services to Russia.
Starting in the 1990s, from Virginia to Boston to Seattle, the agents attended elite Ivy League schools to meet future power brokers, obtained influential jobs, married, had children and bought homes in upscale areas.
Court documents released in the United States described how the Russian agents hobnobbed with academics and assembled data on high-end Manhattan real estate but did not accuse them of actually passing classified information to Moscow.
Chapman, whose glamorous pictures posted on social networking web site Facebook made her a media sensation, is the only one of the 10 spies to have made public appearances.
She recently posed provocatively for the Russian edition of Maxim Magazine and appeared at the launch of a Russian space craft as part of her new job as advisor to a bank that helps finance the space industry.