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US ambassador hears protest over detained spy

Experts are amused at how clumsy the spy was and some are speculating is it really true the CIA has lost the knack of training its intelligence officers properly

US ambassador Michael McFaul was invited to the Russian Foreign Ministry on Wednesday, May 15 to hear a protest over the detention of the embassy’s third secretary, Ryan Fogle, on spying charges. Experts are amused at how clumsy the spy was and some are speculating is it really true the CIA has lost the knack of training its intelligence officers properly.

The daily Novyie Izvestia says the detained US diplomat has been declared persona non grata and must leave Russia within a tight deadline. It is unknown what was said to McFaul at the Foreign Ministry. The US ambassador declined to answer media questions about the incident. Experts believe the detention was arranged for with such great pomp because part of Russia’s elite still wants to show one and all that the United States is not trustworthy.

“The unusual emphasis on the affair stems from the overall context of Russian-US relations,” the deputy president of the Center for Political Technologies, Alexei Makarkin, told Novyie Izvestia. “The Americans have offered Russia to cooperate in many areas, such as the missile defense, Syria and so on. In Russia certain political forces argue that accepting the Americans’ proposals will be risky - the United States is not Russia’s friend, the US missile defense will continue to pose a threat to us and support for Assad in Syria should not be curtailed by any means.

Rossiiskaya Gazeta daily has turned for a comment to a former chief of the federal security service FSB, Nikolai Kovalyov. He is certain the Americans suffered a great failure, while Russia’s counter-intelligence scored a big success. “It was done very professionally. Good job, guys,” he told the Voice of Russia radio station in an interview. The former chief of Russia’s secret service believes that Russia in the recent Tsarnayev brothers affair displayed its absolute readiness to cooperate and to present full information to the Americans. The more so, since the point at issue is information about such outrageous crimes as the Boston bomb blasts.

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