 July 2, 2010 theage.com
A KEY suspect in the Russia-US spy scandal has
vanished in Cyprus after a local court on the divided Mediterranean
island released the alleged Kremlin paymaster on bail.
An international hunt is under way after Christopher Metsos, the alleged
money man for the deep cover Russian spy ring, failed to report to a
police station in Larnaca, a condition of his bail after he was detained
on an international arrest warrant issued by the FBI.
The spy ring was cracked open this week as FBI agents pounced on 10
alleged Russian agents in Boston, New York and the Washington area after
more than a decade of surveillance.
Metsos, the 11th suspect, was still at large at the time, but was
arrested early on Tuesday at Cyprus's Larnaca airport as he tried to
board a flight to the Hungarian capital, Budapest.
To the dismay of US justice officials, he was not deemed enough of a
flight risk to be kept behind bars until he could be extradited to the
US.
The local court let him go free on $A38,500 bail as long as he
surrendered his passport and travel documents, pending an extradition
hearing on July 29.
The breakaway Turkish Cypriot statelet in the north of the island has no
extradition treaties and serves as a well-known haven for fugitives.
Metsos, 56, is accused of receiving money from a Russian agent then
burying it in a park in northern Virginia for the other spies to
retrieve.
The Russian foreign ministry at first criticised the arrests of the 11
and the FBI claims of an espionage ring as ''baseless and improper''. It
hinted that ties could suffer, days after Barack Obama declared a new
era in relations during a visit to Washington by the Russian President,
Dmitry Medvedev.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told former US president Bill
Clinton that US police were ''out of control'' and said he hoped the
arrests would not reverse ''the positive gains''.
However, within hours both sides were dismissing the possibility that
the breaking-up of the alleged spy ring would set back relations.
The Russian foreign ministry said it expected the arrests ''will not
negatively affect Russian-US relations''. The US State Department echoed
the sentiment.
''We're moving towards a more trusting relationship,'' said a State
Department official, Philip Gordon. ''We're beyond the Cold War.''
Part of the reason for the retreat may be the growing scepticism in
Russia and the US over just how serious a threat to American national
security the spy ring posed.
Even after a surveillance operation lasting a decade, the FBI has been
unable to show that the spy ring gathered any intelligence that would
count as espionage.
Moscow has acknowledged that most of the alleged spies hold Russian
citizenship. However, Metsos is a Canadian.
Blond, balding and middle-aged, the Canadian turned up at the Atrium
Zenon apartments, a whitewashed holiday complex on the outskirts of
Larnaca, a city of 140,000 on the south coast of Cyprus, on June 17. He
had booked in, online, for an 11-day stay. But he wasn't alone. The
self-described divorcee had a companion - tall, leggy, much younger.
''She was either Russian or Bulgarian and I'd say she was about 28,''
said hotel receptionist Maria Maou.
''He had a Canadian accent but I never heard her speak. I couldn't tell
you if he spoke to her in Russian or English. They just seemed so
normal, there was nothing out of the ordinary about them.''
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