By NICHOLAS KULISH
VIENNA — There was nothing noir about the exchange of espionage agents in broad daylight on Friday at this city’s international airport. But it served as a reminder of Vienna’s prominent place for more than a century now in the shadowy European espionage game.
Though perhaps less famous in spy lore than divided Berlin to the north, Vienna was one of the hubs for intelligence operations in the cold war. But the tradition dates from the late 19th century, when the Hapsburgs still ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it continues to this day.
“In Vienna, the authorities always knew to look away when they were supposed to look away, and to look more closely when the time was right,” said Siegfried Beer, director of the Austrian Center for Intelligence, Propaganda and Security Studies in Graz.
But for those who think that the swap of agents on Friday was a flashback to a bygone era, Mr. Beer would strongly disagree. “The size of the intelligence community hasn’t changed since the cold war ended,” he said.
While the focus has shifted, mainly toward economic espionage, a report this year by the Austrian Interior Ministry said that the country remained “an important theater of operations for foreign intelligence services.”
“The number of intelligence officers posted to diplomatic missions and international organizations continues to be disproportionately high,” the report said.
Along with New York and Geneva, Vienna is one of the headquarters cities of the United Nations, with several thousand foreign employees in agencies like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the United Nations Industrial Development Organization. The city also hosts the headquarters of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
And with émigré communities from all over the Balkans and Eastern Europe, Vienna is a good place to keep tabs on dissidents. That took a deadly turn, and highly public one, when a Chechen whistle-blower was killed here last year.
The city’s spy scene is best known from the years between 1945 and 1955 when, like Berlin, it was divided into occupation zones after World War II. That period was immortalized in the film “The Third Man,” with its life-or-death splashing chase through the city’s sewers.
Austria remained neutral after the occupation ended. Along with its location in the center of Europe and at the edge of the Iron Curtain, it was an ideal meeting place because of its neutrality.
Austria’s position as a magnet for spies is also encouraged by the fact that it is a crime here to spy against only Austria, not other countries.
“There was no real counterintelligence; you could do whatever you wanted in Vienna,” Paul Lendvai, a writer who worked for decades as a journalist here, said of cold-war-era Vienna. “The joke in those days was that there are more spies than soldiers in Vienna.”
Friday’s swap was a reminder of bygone days, but also a sign of how dramatically the old chessboard had changed. Vienna may have been a hub for spies, but it was Berlin where such exchanges took place. Today, unlike Austria, many of the Soviet Union’s former satellites are members of NATO.
“Austria simply has this tradition as a bridge between East and West, but there really weren’t that many alternatives — Finland, Switzerland and not much more,” said Alexander Rahr, an expert on Russia at the German Council on Foreign Relations.
Martin Vukovich, Austria’s ambassador to Moscow from 2003 to 2009, said that Russians felt comfortable in Austria, with many taking their vacations there, including Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin.
Austrian officials certainly played their part in Friday’s events, refusing to comment on the swap until after both Russia and the United States had discussed it publicly.
People on the streets of Vienna seemed unfazed by the news, even exhibiting a sneaking pride in having their city back on the espionage map. Christel Rits, out for a stroll Friday evening near the city’s famous opera house, said she had been surprised to hear that the city was such an important hub for spies. “I’m sure they do their job well, but I don’t think there’s that much going on in Vienna that they need so many of them,” Ms. Rits said.
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