Moscow, June 29 (Interfax) - Officials who disagree with President Barack Obama's policy aimed at "resetting" relations with Moscow are responsible for the ongoing scandal surrounding the arrest of a group of people in the United States charged with spying for the Russian government, Nikolai Kovalyov, a former director of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), told Interfax.
"I think that certain ‘technicians’ are trying to infect the U.S. president’s "reset" program with some destructive virus," said Kovalyov, who today heads the veterans committee in the lower chamber of Russia’s parliament.
Kovalyov said he was speaking about senior officials of U.S. special services.
"Certainly, it cannot be a simple coincidence that this group of ‘exposed Russian spies’ was arrested immediately after the visit of President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev to the U.S.," he said.
This scandal "will deliver a serious blow primarily to the positions of President Obama himself," he added.
Specialists have a lot of questions over U.S. news reports offering the details of the incident, and they even find them "ludicrous", Kovalyov said.
"Any professional will rock with laughter if he imagines a group of 10-11 illegal agents working together. An illegal agent contacts only one person. This is the golden rule of operations by any special service in the world," he said.
"A situation where illegal agents launder money, use fake documents and keep their money in a glass jar buried underground is total nonsense and a cheap detective story," the expert said, adding that there were thousands of safe means to transfer money.
The Russian authorities will unlikely retaliate by expelling a group of U.S. spies, Kovalyov said.
"I would like to confirm that the people exposed in the U.S. are not Russian diplomats or even ordinary Russian citizens. They are citizens of the U.S.," he said.
"Finally, I can say that the U.S. authorities exposed some group of thieves who allegedly operated for years, but, for some unknown reason, it took special services a really long time to arrest them. And today the same special services hastily decided to accuse these thieves of cooperation with Russia, trying to deliver a blow to the "resetting" of our bilateral relations," Kovalyov said.
