An ex-Romanian ally of the KGB says the premature exposure and exchange of Russian spies in the U.S. was "a huge mistake"

...yesterday, the U.S. intelligence community lost a unique chance to learn what was behind Russia's current illegal operations. It is a huge mistake to have wasted this opportunity by rushing to exchange the ten illegals for, among others, a Russian who was framed as a spy (and does not want to leave Russia). There is nothing in this exchange for the United States. We should have first learned what we can from the ten illegals, before starting to think about exchanging them. Even the infamous Abel was not exchanged until five years after he was sentenced. And he was exchanged for an American who had made history for the U.S.

POST-SOVIET RUSSIA has been transformed in unprecedented positive ways. The barriers the Soviets spent over 70 years erecting between themselves and the rest of the world, as well as between individual Russians, are slowly coming down. Russian culture is reviving, and the country is developing a new national identity.

In 2000, however, some of my former colleagues in the KGB, which instrumented the Cold War, took over the Kremlin at the end of a palace coup and instituted what seems to be the first intelligence dictatorship in history. During the Soviet Union, the KGB, which killed off some twenty million people, was a state within the state. Now the KGB is the state. Over 6,000 former KGB officers are running Russia's federal and local governments, and they are also managing the country's oil and natural gas industries, which were renationalized.

On February 12, 2004, Russia's new tsar, Vladimir Putin, declared the demise of the Soviet Union a "national tragedy on an enormous scale." We kept quiet. In July 2007, he predicted a new Cold War against the West. We kept quiet. "War has started," Putin announced on August 8, 2008, minutes after Russian tanks crossed into the pro-Western country of Georgia. We kept quiet. But the remarkable number of Russian illegal officers identified inside the U.S. strongly suggests that the Kremlin is indeed engaged in a new Cold War against us.