Russia Hunts Double Agent Who Betrayed Spies, Newspaper Says

Booking photographs of the 10 Russian agents arrested in June by U.S. federal agents.

By ROBERT MACKEY
NYT

A Moscow newspaper reported on Thursday that the Kremlin has dispatched an assassin to hunt down a suspected double agent it blames for betraying the Russian spies arrested in June by the United States.

According to the report in Kommersant, an unnamed Kremlin official said that the former head of the Russian intelligence service’s “illegal” spying operations in the U.S., a Colonel Shcherbakov, had betrayed his colleagues and is now being actively sought out.

The newspaper said the double agent had left Moscow for the U.S. in June, just days before the spies were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

“We know who he is and where he is,” the Kremlin official told Kommersant, adding, “Do not doubt that a Mercader has been sent after him already.”

(More here.)