By Simon Shuster

MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev bestowed the country’s highest state honor Monday on the Russian sleeper agents deported from the United States as part of the countries’ biggest spy swap since the Cold War, the Interfax news agency reported.

Anna Chapman, a Russian national who was deported from the United States this summer for alleged spying for Russia, is seen with an unidentified security man at a ceremony for a U.S. astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts at the Russian-leased Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan on Thursday, Oct. 7, 2010. (AP Photo/Dmitry Lovetsky)

MOSCOW — President Dmitry Medvedev bestowed the country’s highest state honor Monday on the Russian sleeper agents deported from the United States as part of the countries’ biggest spy swap since the Cold War, the Interfax news agency reported.

The awards were handed out at a Kremlin ceremony less than four months after the exchange, the agency quoted Medvedev spokeswoman Natalya Timakova as saying. No other details on the ceremony were available, and Kremlin spokespeople were not immediately reachable.

In June, 10 Russian agents who infiltrated suburban America were deported in exchange for four people convicted in Russia of spying for the West.

The spies received a hero’s welcome in Russia, with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin leading them in a patriotic singalong in July.

The most famous of the agents, Anna Chapman, visited the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan this month for the launch of a Russian spaceship, fueling her celebrity in Russia and abroad.

Ms. Chapman was in Baikonur ostensibly as the new celebrity face of a Moscow bank.