Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Monday handed top state honors to the Russian spies deported from the U.S. in July in the biggest spy scandal since the Cold War, the Kremlin said.
“A ceremony took place in the Kremlin today to hand top state honors to a number of Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) employees, including the spies who were working in the United States and returned to Russia in July,” Kremlin spokeswoman Natalya Timakova said in a statement on Russian news agencies.
No television footage or pictures were released of the ceremony, which came on the same day as another ceremony where Medvedev received the credentials of new foreign ambassadors.
The group of 10 spies, many of whom had been working for years undercover in the U.S. as sleeper agents, returned to Russia in a sensational spy swap that saw Moscow send four Russian convicts to the West.
They included the glamorous Anna Chapman, who became a figure of international notoriety and mysteriously resurfaced earlier this month at a space launch in Kazakhstan.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who served as a KGB agent in East Germany, has said that he has met the spies and even sung patriotic songs with them. He blamed “traitors” for blowing their cover.
Many ex-KGB spies have gone on the record slamming the shoddy and apparently antiquated spy craft of the SVR spies, who were working for the successor agency of the Soviet KGB.