LARNACA, Cyprus, July 4, (AP): The alleged paymaster of a Russian spy ring in the United States spoke no more than necessary. He stayed in modest hotels and dressed for the Mediterranean heat: shorts and untucked shirts. He wore spectacles and a clipped mustache.
Just another foreign tourist on a budget, it seemed, in a waterfront city in Cyprus where foreign tourists on budgets are a summertime fixture.
To American officials, the man identified as Christopher Robert Metsos is the spy who got away, a footloose operative who funneled money to US-based accomplices, 10 of whom are in custody. Metsos, the FBI says, was a key player in an underworld of coded instructions, false identities, buried banknotes and surreptitious bag swaps.
“If you saw him on the road, you would say, ‘Good morning’ and you would keep walking,” said Michael Papathanasiou, a lawyer who represented Metsos until he jumped bail in Larnaca last week. “There was really nothing strange about him. He was a very normal, usual guy.”
The tale of how this mysterious figure eluded authorities in Cyprus is one of the more intriguing episodes in a spy saga recalling the cloak-and-dagger days of Cold War espionage.

Greek Cypriot officials believe he fled the divided island, and crossing into the breakaway Turkish Cypriot north may have offered an avenue of escape. But the US Embassy said it had not asked Turkish Cypriot authorities for help in tracking the fugitive.
Witness accounts suggest Metsos was a textbook spy — soothingly banal, a fly on the wall who took advantage of loopholes in law enforcement. He was traveling as a tourist on a Canadian passport, and a man in Canada has said the identity was stolen from his dead brother.
On June 17, Metsos, said to be 54 years old, checked into the Atrium Zenon, a cream-colored block of hotel apartments on a busy shopping street one block from the Larnaca waterfront. He paid 40 euros in cash daily for the room. He was accompanied by a “beautiful” woman with short brown hair of about 30 or 35, according to a receptionist who spoke on condition of anonymity in line with hotel policy.
The discreet pair always ate out and sometimes dressed for the beach. In the mornings, Metsos dropped the key at reception with a polite but curt greeting. The woman waited for him by the lobby door. The receptionist never heard her speak.
On June 29, they checked out early, and Metsos was arrested on an Interpol warrant at the airport while trying to board a flight to Budapest, Hungary with his companion. Cyprus’ Justice Minister, Loucas Louca, said she boarded the flight because police had no reason to hold her.
It is uncertain whether Metsos was in Cyprus on vacation, or posing as a tourist. There is a heavy Russian presence in Greek Cyprus.
Unwitting Cypriot police and court officials initially appeared unaware that Metsos was suspected of espionage. Two days earlier, officials in the United States arrested suspects in the spy case after years of surveillance and Metsos, cited in US court papers, was about to get caught in the firestorm of publicity.
The drama that day began for Papathanasiou when he got a call from a Larnaca court. Metsos, wanted in the United States for alleged money laundering and acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, needed a lawyer. There was no mention of spying.

“He told me that he had nothing to do with this case. He didn’t understand why he was there,” Papathanasiou said in an interview at his office on Saturday. “He was very quiet. He answered my questions. We ordered coffee and water when we were waiting before the court.”
Bail was set at 27,000 euros ($33,000), and an extradition hearing was scheduled for late July. Metsos’ passport was confiscated. It was a fair decision, Papathanasiou said, based on available facts. The amount that his client was accused of laundering — $40,000 — was far below the millions he expected.
Greek Cypriot President Dimitris Christofias has deflected US Justice Department criticism over Metsos’ release, saying US authorities were slow in providing certain documents to Cypriot police.
A police photo of Metsos shows a bald Caucasian in a casual shirt. His skin has a reddish tinge, as though from sun exposure. His expression is impassive.
Bail paid, Metsos paid 630 euros ($790) in advance for a two-week stay the Achilleos hotel. Faded, tattered flags, including American and Russian ones, hang outside the hotel. A handwritten sign says: “We have residents sleeping upstairs. Please when smoking outside, keep the noise down.”
After registering at the police station two blocks away, Metsos hung the “Do not disturb” sign outside his door. He failed to report to police as required on June 30, and hotel staff never saw him leave.


The Russian diplomat’s daughter accused of being a spy is “embarrassed” by photos of her that have turned up in media reports and fears she will be deported, her lawyer said.
Attorney Robert Baum told The Associated Press that he showed Anna Chapman, 28, some of the tabloid newspaper stories that have branded the redhead as a femme fatale and feature photographs from her Facebook page, showing the smiling Russian enjoying Manhattan’s nightlife scene, posing in front of the Statue of Liberty and mixing with businessmen at a conference.
“She was embarrassed by some of the photos that were obviously taken from her Facebook pages,” the lawyer said. “The truth is she probably no different than your typical single 28-year-old woman in New York City. She runs a successful business, goes out at night. She dates men, enjoys a social life.”
Chapman is charged with conspiring to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government, which carries a potential penalty of five years in prison. She was the first of 10 spy suspects arrested over the weekend in the United States to be denied bail.
Baum said Chapman’s father told her to go to police with a fake passport an undercover FBI agent had given to her, leading to her arrest and solitary confinement. He said he may use that information to appeal the bail decision.

At a bail hearing Monday, Assistant US Attorney Michael Farbiarz said only that investigators on June 27 intercepted phone calls in which Chapman was “talking to a man who is advising her, who is telling her essentially ... to make up a story, to say that she’s being intimidated, that this might be some other criminal activity, and who advises her to get out of the country and to go to the police.”
Baum said he believed the phone calls cited by prosecutors were conversations between Chapman and her father, whom Baum described as a low-level embassy employee whose family was middle class.
Baum said Chapman told him she reached out to her father, Vasily Kushchenko, a day after an FBI agent posing as a Russian consulate employee asked her to deliver a fraudulent passport to another woman working as a spy.
“She spoke to her father, and her father said, ‘Go turn the passport in,”’ Baum said. “Her father said, ‘You’ve got this passport. It’s forged. Go turn it into the police,’ and that’s exactly what she did.”
Yusill Scribner, a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors in Manhattan, declined to comment on Baum’s comments.
Baum discounted published reports Friday quoting Chapman’s ex-husband as saying her father is a spy.
“I won’t go into the circumstances of divorce, but he may be somewhat bitter about it,” Baum said.
Baum said he has spent several hours with his client over two nights this week, finding her “very frightened.”
He said she was kept isolated in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn. He said she is allowed one hour a day of exercise, the only time she is allowed to be with another inmate.
Otherwise, she is given no access to phones, television or newspapers, Baum said.