´óÏó´«Ã½

Ten people who admitted to spying for Moscow in the US have arrived in Russia after being part of the Here is some reaction from US media:

whether the United States could have performed better in negotiations with Russia:

"Given that the Russians haven't identified any bumbling American sleeper agents in Russia, at least as far as we know, one wonders what a better deal might have looked like. Would the Russians be willing to part with vast quantities of weapons grade plutonium? Or a best-and-the-brightest assortment of gifted ballet dancers and hockey players and computer programmers and avant-garde novelists?

"When we consider the extraordinary success of the hundreds of thousands of Russian emigres who've settled in the US since the legendary Senator Scoop Jackson came to the rescue of so-called Soviet refuseniks, you could say that we've already gotten the better end of the deal. But is it wrong to expect a little bit more? If nothing else, a bigger concession would convey due respect for the excellence of the FBI's counterintelligence team."

As the spy swap wraps up, the US and Russia seem to have both avoided the topic of the 11th suspect:

"Both sides also seem to have skirted the 11th alleged Russian spy named in the US indictment. He disappeared last week in Cyprus after authorities there granted him bail, and no public mention of his fate has been made amid the swap negotiations. On Thursday, Gennady Gudkov, deputy chairman of the Russian parliament's security committee, said the most important part of the deal was damage control, not details."

"And those mistakes were pretty embarrassing - like speaking with a thick Russian accent while pretending to be Irish and accepting bags of money from undercover agents of the FBI, according to the affidavit. Many more of their gaffes would surely have been revealed if their case had gone to trial, and that is something Washington as well as Moscow seemed keen to avoid."

his attention on the initial arrests of the Russian prisoners:

"On the one hand, it is most gratifying to spring four men from the hell of the Russian jails and hard labor camps. On the other, there is the grotesque inequity of the 'swap': full-fledged, deep cover 'moles' for Russian prisoners who almost certainly were victims of political repression. The main - if not, indeed, the sole - goal of their arrests (all in the first five years of Putin's presidency) was to signal the end of the post-Soviet freedom of contacts with foreigners: henceforth everyone in the "sensitive" areas of work needed to clear such contacts with their superiors, just as in the Soviet days."

that President Obama may face harsh criticism from the right for what unfolded during negotiations with the Russians:

"The flipside for Obama is that, by agreeing to a spy swap, he will give opposition Republicans an opening for further criticism that the Democratic president has been too soft on Russia and weak on national security."

we may be getting the bad end of the deal with Russia:

"We are sending them 10 Russians accused of living under false identities and actively trying to get information about American defense, industry and government. We are getting in return Russian citizens who were found - some a generation ago - to have had contact with the CIA or suspected CIA front organizations."

agrees:

"It could be argued that the arrangement favored Moscow, since it was spared further embarrassment over the exploits of the 10 while washing its hands of an inconvenient prisoner: Igor Sutyagin, an arms control researcher who in 2004 was jailed on charges of passing information to the CIA."

has an optimistic outlook as the story wraps up:

"Whatever, it has been great beach reading. It'll be a terrific movie. Let's call it 'The Cul De Sac Capers'. It's so juicy the nervous producers and executives won't even emasculate the script. To those who would argue 'You can't make this stuff up', I would say 'Sure you can'. It's not that 'Truth is stranger than fiction', what's really strange is that we believe a word of it."