From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, eight years ago, the US and Russia agreed to a spy swap that sent a Russian double agent to safety in the UK.

This month, Russia allegedly poisoned that same spy. What happened in the years between?

It's Tuesday, March 27th.

Peter, set the scene for us on July 9th, 2010 in Vienna.

Well, it's like a flashback to the old Cold War. You have two airplanes landing at the airport in Vienna, Austria, one Russian and one American within quick succession.

And they park near each other and you can't see who's getting off because they're covered.

Obviously, somebody of importance is getting off of the Russian plane and moving over to the American plane and vice versa.

And what you have here is kind of an old-fashioned spy swap, except nothing like this had happened since the end of the Cold War.

This is the largest spy swap we've seen since the days of the Soviet Union.

Peter Baker covered the spy swap in Vienna.

And who is being swapped for whom? Who are these Russians that the US is returning?

Ten Russian citizens sent to the US with what are called legends, fabricated birth certificates, Irish and Latino surnames, trained in the use of invisible ink and secret radio transmissions.

The Russians being returned by America were sleeper agents who had been in the United States undercover for dozens of years.

They're people living in Montclair, New Jersey. They're folks living in Seattle and they moved to Boston. They seem to be getting along in the suburbs there.

We had no idea. They just seemed like a nice family. They landscaped. They just did nice family stuff.

They had children, they had jobs, they're kids were in schools, they had very elaborate cover stories.

Eight of the defendants have been accused of carrying out deep cover assignments in the US on behalf of Russia.

And the idea was that someday they might be activated in a way that would be useful for Russian intelligence.

It's basically like a real life version of the Americas without quite as much of the glamour.

But as I ever call it, it didn't feel all that threatening because the threat from Russia at this point just eight years ago was nowhere near as high as it had been in the Cold War.

So it kind of felt almost a little comical. The idea that these people were going to be activated as they would have been during the Cold War.

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