Who did better from the spy swap?

Some say the Americans:

“I don’t think there’s any doubt — I think the U.S. won,” NBC National Security Producer Robert Windrem said Friday. He said the four freed by the Russians were coming "with real information and there’s no evidence the guys from the U.S. got anything.”

And here.

Others say the Russians:

With this spy exchange, it seems that we will continue not to understand how the Russian secret service really operates.

The basics, folks:

In any deal there are good things you get.

And bad things you avoid or reduce.

Good things can be traded for other good things – or for reduced bad things.

My sense of this one is that the ‘West’ achieved some pretty ‘good’ things: the freedom of several Western agents or suspected agents imprisoned in Russia (an end in itself), who may or may not have excellent information to hand over.

The Russians in turn got some modest good things – their own people back, even if they now have to pretend to be nice to them. Much more importantly, they reduced somewhat the scale of the bad things.

They managed to secure the prompt return to Russia of a large group of people whom they’ll want to interrogate for a very long time, to try to find out how much they told the Americans and how much the Americans may have found out about Russian intelligence techniques.

The idea that these Russian illegals/sleepers were spending their time sucking up to Harvard professors or infilitrating the local school group is, of course, trivial disinformation. They also will have had a lot more duties helping other spies set about their business. More often than not, they will have received some instructions – do x and y – without knowing what purpose it served.

Thus if the Americans have been watching them for some time, they will have gained all sorts of leads on much wider Russian intelligence activities in the USA.

And when the ship is sinking, blocking whichever holes you can find in the hull is the number one priority. In slower time you can work out why the holes appeared, and then set the ship back on course.

Bottom line: if the Russians do any deal, they think they’ve won – in the terms which most matter to them.

And who am I to disagree?