“…assignments given the ring by their handlers in Moscow indicates that Russian espionage has been taken over by think-tank types and policy wonks ladling out softcore assignments like assessing ‘outlooks’ and ‘moods’.”
There’s been ripe chortling about the spy network run in the U.S.A. by the Russian SVR – successor to the KGB in the area of foreign intelligence. The eleven accused were supposedly a bunch of bumblers so deficient in remitting secrets to Moscow across nearly a decade that the FBI can’t even muster the evidence to charge them with espionage.
The ten who have been arrested are accused of conspiracy to act as agents of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general, which is what lobbyists here do if they are working for, say, Georgia or China. Their filings are available for public review at the Commerce Department. If the Russians are convicted, they could be sentenced up to five years in prison.
All of the defendants who appeared in the New York court except one, the fetching Anna Chapman, are also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering, which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years of prison.
Assuming their lawyers don’t get them off, a doubtful proposition, we can assume the Russians will round up 11 Americans, accuse them of spying and then do a trade. Then both sides will start again, the Russians training fresh sets of agents to spout American baseball records, burn hamburgers over the backyard grill, jog and do other all-American things like have negative equity on their houses and owe the IRS money, and the Americans forcing their agents to read Dostoevsky.
The network wasn’t so dumb in conception. Anna Chapman, her photo now being ogled across the net, listed herself as the chief executive officer of PropertyFinder Ltd., a Manhattan real estate firm. This would have been a good springboard into intimate contacts and possibly productive blackmail, with Wall Street tycoons, and the vast espionage target known as the U.N. hq in midtown.
The couple in Boston were nicely located to consort with the hundreds of U.S. government consultants, active advisors and retired officials, roosting at Harvard and MIT. Secrets to steal? There are plenty in the greater Boston/Cambridge area. In the mid-1990s, the director of the Central Intelligence was John Deutch, formerly a prof at MIT, who came under heavy investigation after his retirement for having kept top-secret intelligence files on his home computers. Deutch, born in Brussels with a Russian Jewish father, was pardoned by Bill Clinton in his last day in office.