Cold War-like spy exchange in Vienna
An elaborate spy swap reminiscent of the Cold War took place Friday at Vienna International Airport -- a minutely choreographed operation involving 10 members of a Russian espionage ring that infiltrated American suburbia and four Russians who had been jailed in Russia for their contacts with the West....
Though in some ways a throwback to the Cold War, Friday's drama was a far cry from the last major spy swap, which took place in 1986 at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge, an Iron Curtain crossing between East Germany and West Berlin that at the time was floodlit and guarded by soldiers with guns and dogs. That deal traded Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky -- now Natan Sharansky -- and three Western agents for five Soviet bloc spies.
During the Cold War, "every crossing point from East to West had the tenseness of a major surgical operation," wrote John le Carré in "Smiley's People," a classic novel of East-West skullduggery. Friday's runway ballet of jets, by contrast, took place in bright sunlight amid signs of unusual U.S.-Russia cooperation....
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Though in some ways a throwback to the Cold War, Friday's drama was a far cry from the last major spy swap, which took place in 1986 at Berlin's Glienicke Bridge, an Iron Curtain crossing between East Germany and West Berlin that at the time was floodlit and guarded by soldiers with guns and dogs. That deal traded Soviet dissident Anatoly Shcharansky -- now Natan Sharansky -- and three Western agents for five Soviet bloc spies.
During the Cold War, "every crossing point from East to West had the tenseness of a major surgical operation," wrote John le Carré in "Smiley's People," a classic novel of East-West skullduggery. Friday's runway ballet of jets, by contrast, took place in bright sunlight amid signs of unusual U.S.-Russia cooperation....