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| July 1, 2010: The alleged bungling Russian spy ring busted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) this week had everything it needed for world-class espionage: excellent training, cutting-edge gadgetry, deep knowledge of American culture, and meticulously constructed cover stories. The only things missing in more than a decade of operation were actual secrets to send home to Moscow, according to The New York Times. The assignments, described in secret instructions intercepted by the FBI, were to collect routine political gossip and policy talk that might have been more efficiently gathered by surfing the internet. And none of the 11 people accused in the case face charges of espionage, because in all those years they were never caught sending classified information back to Moscow, American officials said. “What in the world do they think they were going to get out of this, in this day and age?” said Richard F. Stolz, a former head of U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) spy operations and a onetime Moscow Station Chief. “The effort is out of proportion to the alleged benefits. I just don’t understand what they expected.” As Cold War veterans puzzled about the rationale for Russia’s extraordinary effort to place agents in American society, both Russian and American officials signaled that the arrests would not affect the warming of relations between the countries. At a meeting with former President Bill Clinton on Tuesday, June 29, 2010, Vladimir V. Putin, the prime minister and a former spy himself, said, “Your police have gotten carried away, putting people in jail.” But he played down the episode: “I really expect that the positive achievements that have been made in our intergovernmental relations lately will not be damaged by the latest events.” White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “I do not believe that this will affect the reset of our relationship with Russia. We have made great progress in the past year and a half working on issues of mutual concern.” Asked if the White House found it offensive for its partner to be spying on the United States, he said the case was “important,” but a law enforcement matter. Meanwhile on June 29, the police in Cyprus arrested the man known as Christopher R. Metsos, the last of the spying suspects to be detained, and American officials disclosed that they had moved to make arrests during the weekend because one of the people suspected of being Russian agents, who called himself Richard Murphy, was planning to fly out of the United States on Sunday night, June 27, 2010, possibly for good. After years of surveillance, the FBI did not want any of its targets to escape, and “you can’t take down one without taking down all of them,” one law enforcement official said. The FBI on Sunday, June 27, 2010, arrested 10 people in Yonkers, New York City, New Jersey, Boston and Virginia, and charged them with conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign government. Most were also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering.
American officials said they believed that most of the accused spies had been born in Russia and had been given sophisticated training before resettling in the United States, posing as married couples. They connected with various Americans of influence or knowledge, including a “prominent New York-based financier” described as a political fund-raiser with personal ties to a Cabinet official, a former high-ranking national security official, and a nuclear weapons expert. But they were instructed not to seek government jobs, because spy bosses in Moscow thought their cover stories would not stand up under a serious background investigation. So they were assigned to feed to Moscow what amounted to briefing papers on economics issues, American government players, and diplomatic and military affairs. The CIA is an independent federal government agency, and the FBI is a division of the U.S. Department of Justice. |
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