A former colonel in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, Sergei Skripal, and scientist Igor Sutyagin will most likely stay in U.K. after Friday's spy swap in Vienna, British media reported on Saturday.
Under the spy exchange deal, Russia agreed to release four Russian prisoners in exchange for ten people, who have pleaded guilty in a New York court to failing to register as foreign agents.
The CIA-chartered plane, which carried the four to the U.S. from Vienna, made a brief stop at the Brize Norton air base in Oxfordshire.
"In an indication of a significant role the UK played in the spy swap, it is understood that two of the Russian members, one of them Sutyagin, did not continue on to America," Daily Mail wrote.
In April 2004, Igor Sutyagin, a Russian arms control and nuclear weapons specialist, was sentenced to 15 years in prison in Archangelsk, northwest Russia, for sharing state secrets with U.S. military intelligence.
"Britain has a direct interest in Skripal, a former Russian army colonel convicted of passing the identities of Russian agents working undercover in Europe to MI6," Guardian wrote.
Sources told Daily Telegraph that a small number of CIA officers had flown into Britain to help MI6 colleagues with the debriefing.
"It is likely that CIA and MI6 officers will be given access to each other's agents after their initial debriefing," the paper said.
