Mystery lingers after swap

The 14 spies swapped by Moscow and Washington were starting new lives Saturday in Russia and the West, but mystery shrouded their precise whereabouts after the biggest spy exchange since the Cold War.

Ten Kremlin agents expelled by Washington in Friday's handover at Vienna Airport were reportedly debriefed at Russian intelligence headquarters in Moscow, while four deported Russians were thought to be in Britain or the US.

Igor Sutyagin, an arms expert, has found himself at a hotel somewhere in Britain, without a visa and still wearing his Russian prison clothes, his brother Dmitry said after Igor finally made contact with his family.

According to British media reports, Sutyagin and Sergei Skripal, a former colonel with Russian military's intelligence arm GRU and convicted of spying for Britain, were dropped off in Britain.

A plane carrying some of the four convicts freed by Russia landed at an international airport outside Washington Friday, an AFP correspondent said, but it was unclear how many of them were on board.

Russian television, citing what it said were Western reports, said one of the men, convicted spy Alexander Zaporozhsky, would now lead a comfortable life at his nearly-$1-million mansion in Maryland.

As for the fate of the 10 Kremlin agents, Russia virtually imposed a news blackout on all questions linked to them.

On Friday, the Kremlin swiftly loaded them into two minivans and whisked them from Moscow's Domodedovo airport in an unknown direction.

The country's top sensationalist website, lifenews.ru, said that at least one of the 10 agents - 28-year-old redhead Anna Chapman, who fascinated tabloids around the world - had contacted her family upon arrival.

"Anya called her sister from the Domodedovo airport and said a few words: 'Everything is fine, we've landed,'" the report quoted an unidentified family friend as saying.

US Vice President Joe Biden said it was all right that the United States only got four accused spies from Russia while giving up 10.

"We got back four really good ones," Biden said on "The Tonight Show with host Jay Leno" on Friday night. "And the 10, they've been here a long time, but they hadn't done much."

US attorney general Eric Holder said in a CBS interview Sunday that all the children of the 10 Russian spies freed in a dramatic swap with Moscow have been sent to Russia to rejoin their parents.

Agencies