FOROS, Ukraine — Vladimir Putin says he met with the Russian spies who were expelled from the United States, joining them in singing an unofficial KGB anthem and promising them good jobs and a bright future back in their homeland.
Russia’s prime minister said late Saturday that he recently got together with the 10 sleeper agents, without saying when or where.
The agents were deported from the U.S. earlier this month in the biggest spy scandal since the Cold War.
“We talked about life,” Putin told reporters in Ukraine. “We sang ‘What Motherland Begins With’ and other songs of that character.”
“What Motherland Begins With” is a song from the 1968 television series about Soviet spies in Nazi Germany.
The song is widely known as an unofficial anthem of Russian intelligence officers.
Putin, a former KGB officer who in the early 1980s worked in communist East Germany as a low-level functionary, spoke about the uneasy lives the secret agents had in the U.S., where they were caught by the FBI in U.S. cities and suburbs where they had been living for more than a decade.
“They had a very difficult fate,” Putin said, referring to the expelled spies who spent years of burrowing into American society. “They had to carry out a task to benefit their motherland’s interests for many, many years without a diplomatic cover, risking themselves and those close to them.”
Front Section, Pages 2 on 07/26/2010