Russia’s Espionage Boss Tries Turncoat-Wanted Ad

An appeal by Russia’s espionage chief for prospective double agents doesn’t seem to have turned up any new traitors. But it did inspire a burst of front-page humor in Russian newspapers.

Several dailies couldn’t help guffawing Thursday in response to the unusual offer this week by the chief of the Federal Security Service, Gen. Nikolai Kovalyov.

Kovalyov said Russians working for foreign intelligence services would be granted immunity from prosecution and could retain the money paid by their foreign masters if they offered to switch sides again and work as double agents for Moscow.

In a television broadcast Thursday, he repeated a special telephone number for would-be turncoats to call.

“Russian citizens caught up in the web of foreign secret services!” the influential daily Izvestia wrote in reporting the appeal. “The Motherland gives you a real chance to gain a new profession and retain your freedom and the money earned on the sale of said Motherland.

“Don’t pass this by. Nowhere in the world there is such a chance, and, most likely, will not be,” the newspaper said.

The liberal daily Moskovsky Komsomolets also made fun of the offer: “You can already imagine hardened spies lining up at the doors of the FSB chief’s office.”

“Either the general has a highly developed sense of humor (which one would like to believe) or he is a courageous innovator in the sphere of delicate operations (which one does not want to believe),” the paper wrote.

Since the first announcement, calls to the hotline and the spy agency’s Moscow headquarters “have been coming in constantly, around the clock,” Federal Security Service spokesman Boris Andreyev said Thursday.