MOSCOW. Nov 11 (Interfax) - Col. Shcherbakov from the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) personally provided U.S. special services with information on ten Russian agents who were arrested and then deported in June this year, Kommersant newspaper reported on Thursday.
Shcherbakov earlier headed an SVR department dealing with the work of undercover agents in the U.S.
"He personally contributed to exposing the most valuable and experienced Russian illegal agent, Mikhail Vasenkov, 65, also known as Juan Lazaro," Kommersant reported.
Shcherbakov "handed Vasenkov-Lazaro's personal file to the Americans after he brought it from Moscow," the newspaper claimed.
The SVR failed to unmask Shcherbakov before his defection to the U.S. despite it having a number of indirect signs that should have been treated as suspicious, it reported.
"The SVR did not suspect anything even when Shcherbakov declined promotion he was entitled to about one year before the spy scandal - perhaps in order to avoid a polygraph test, a procedure mandatory in such cases. This means that he was actively cooperating with U.S. special services already then," the article says.
The SVR also overlooked the fact that Shcherbakov's daughter lived in the U.S., it said.
"Finally, nobody paid attention to the fact that Shcherbakov's son, who served in another law enforcement agency, the Drug Control Service, hastily left Russia for America shortly before the Russian agents were uncovered. The traitor himself, according to a well-informed source from Russian government institutions, defected from the country only three days prior to Dmitry Medvedev's June visit to the U.S.," it claimed.
"After that, the Americans, fearing that we could have sensed treachery and pulled our illegal agents out of the U.S., started arresting them," the Kommersant source said. "This put the White House in an extremely embarrassing situation and made it nervous: after all, nobody wanted to complicate Medvedev's first visit to the States," Kommersant said.
"The U.S. authorities said in June that the Russian agents had been put under surveillance ten years before," it said.
The SVR has been conducting a sweeping investigation since the agents' exposure, Kommersant said citing its sources.
"The investigation into the SVR failure, which is being held with a number of other Russian security agencies involved, including the FSB [Federal Security Service], is considered unprecedented, and it will result in a number of heads rolling," Kommersant said, quoting a source familiar with the investigation.