A trade is proposed
Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, had once met Mikhail Fradkov, head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service. They had dined together in Washington, and Panetta asked his companion what he thought was Russia’s biggest intelligence failure. America’s, he volunteered, was the case for invading Iraq.
Fradkov paused for a long time, then responded simply, ‘Penkovsky’. Panetta was taken aback; the answer spoke volumes about the way the Russian system viewed moles. Oleg Penkovsky was a colonel in the GRU who had spied for the CIA and British intelligence during the 1950s and 1960s. He was apprehended by Soviet authorities and, it is believed, shot.
Now it was the summer of 2010, and Panetta was on the phone with Fradkov, hoping to set in motion a deal that would free another GRU mole. Days earlier, the FBI had arrested 10 Russian sleeper agents.
‘These people are yours,’ Panetta said he told Fradkov.
‘I said, ‘Look, we’re going to prosecute them; it could be very embarrassing for you’,’ Panetta recalled saying in an interview. ‘You’ve got three or four people who we want, and I propose that we make a trade.’
On a hot July day, guards at Correctional Colony No. 5 in the Russian Republic of Mordovia came to Skripal’s cell and told him to gather his things. He was taken to Moscow’s Lefortovo prison, where he met briefly with his family before being loaded onto a small plane.