This summer, the US exposed and rounded up a ring of so-called “sleeper” spies working for Russia, whose activities later seemed rather innocuous for counterespionage efforts to have discovered.  At the time, the media reported that the ring that came to be most identified with Anna Chapman for her looks and lifestyle had conducted itself with such incompetence that exposure became inevitable.  Today, the Russian newspaper Kommersant — known for its ties to high-ranking government officials — reports that a key defection at the top of the Russian espionage agency gave up the ring:

The head of Russia’s deep cover U.S. spying operations has betrayed the network and defected, a Russian paper said on Thursday, potentially giving the West one of its biggest intelligence coups since the end of the Cold War.

The newspaper, Kommersant, named the man as Colonel Shcherbakov, and said he was responsible for unmasking a Russianspy ring in the United States in June whose arrests humiliated Moscow and clouded a “reset” in ties with Washington.

The betrayal would make Shcherbakov one of the most senior turncoats since the fall of the Soviet Union and could have consequences for Russia’s proud ForeignIntelligence Service (SVR) and its chief, former prime minister Mikhail Fradkov.

The news appears to have been confirmed by Vladimir Putin himself.  In remarks to the ring on their return, Putin warned that “traitors” always came to a bad end, and hinted strongly that their spy service would work to make sure it happened in this case.  “The special services live by their own laws and everyone knows what these laws are,” Putin insisted.  The deputy chair of the Duma’s security committee confirmed it, and noted that Scherbakov left Moscow just days before the US arrested the spies and never returned.

If anyone doubts that Russia plays the game any differently than during its Cold War-KGB era, one unnamed official told Kommersant that they know where Scherbakov is and “do not doubt that a Mercader has been sent” to settle the score.  Ramon Mercader assassinated Leon Trotsky with an ice pick in Mexico after fleeing the USSR in a dispute with Joseph Stalin, criticizing the Stalin regime from abroad.  Presumably the US has Scherbakov under tight security, because the Russians have not been shy about murdering exiles abroad in the post-Cold War era.

The US, meanwhile, managed to score a big coup in turning such a high-ranking official.  But why expose him and render him neutralized for the Anna Chapman ring, which even the US admitted didn’t do a particularly large amount of damage?   The Kommersant report includes an interesting tidbit:

Kommersant reported that Shcherbakov had long been a double agent and had refused an offer of promotion before the scandal erupted, presumably to avoid a routine lie detector test.

That probably set off alarm bells in the CIA as well as the Kremlin.  At that point, it probably made little sense to allow the sleepers to continue in their deception.  The big question, though, will be what other efforts the US managed to disrupt — because if Anna Chapman was the best the Russians could do, they have bigger problems than settling scores with Scherbakov.