By Adam Nichols
DNAinfo News Editor
They're back in the former U.S.S.R.
Manhattan spy Anna Chapman and her espionage comrades landed in Mother Russia Friday after a spy swap the like of which hasn't been seen since the height of the Cold War.
The ten Russian agents arrested in the US flew to Vienna on a charter flight out of LaGuardia airport accompanied by US marshals, the New York Post reported.
The jet rolled up to the side of a Russian Yak-42 carrying four moles who'd been spying on Russia for the west. The agents switched planes.
The swap took just 90 minutes. The Russian jet then took off for Moscow, with Chapman and her fellow moles on board.
The American plane made a stop in the United Kingdom to unload scientist Igor Sutyagin and former Russian colonel Alexander Zaporozhsky, and then took its other two passengers to Washington DC.
Russian media said Chapman, 28, called her sister after arriving in Moscow.
"Everything's fine, we've landed," she said.
Then the spies were whisked off in a motorcade.
Chapman's lawyer has said his client intends to move to London, where she is a citizen through a previous marriage.
But British officials have put her case "under urgent consideration" after she pleaded guilty to being an unregistered foreign agent in Manhattan Federal Court.
British media outlets reported officials were looking to see if her marriage to a British citizen was a sham.
"The Home Secretary has the right to deprive dual nationals of their British citizenship where she considers that to do so would be conducive to the public good," a government spokesman told the BBC.
Feds claim Chapman, who lived in the Financial District, tried to get close to people in power, and passed information on to a Russian agent every Wednesday.
