11 Russian Spys Charged...

Spys among us!!!


After years of F.B.I. surveillance, investigators decided to make the arrests last weekend, just after an upbeat visit to President Obama by the Russian president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said one administration official.

Mr. Obama was not happy about the timing, but investigators feared some of their targets might flee, the official said.


Criminal complaints filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan on Monday read like an old-fashioned cold war thriller:

Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past one another in a train station stairway.

An identity borrowed from a dead Canadian, forged passports, messages sent by shortwave burst transmission or in invisible ink.

A money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York.

But the network of so-called illegals -- spies operating under false names outside of diplomatic cover -- also used cyber-age technology, according to the charges.

They embedded coded texts in ordinary-looking images posted on the Internet, and they communicated by having two agents with laptops containing special software pass casually as messages flashed between them.

Neighbors in Montclair, N.J., of the couple who called themselves Richard and Cynthia Murphy were flabbergasted when a team of F.B.I. agents turned up Sunday night and led the couple away in handcuffs.

One person who lives nearby called them "suburbia personified," saying that they had asked people for advice about the local schools.

Others worried about the Murphys' elementary-age daughters.

Jessie Gugig, 15, said she could not believe the charges, especially against Mrs. Murphy. "They couldn't have been spies," she said jokingly.

"Look what she did with the hydrangeas."

Experts on Russian intelligence expressed astonishment at the scale, longevity and dedication of the program.

They noted that Vladimir V. Putin, the Russian prime minister and former president and spy chief, had worked to restore the prestige and funding of Russian espionage after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dark image of the K.G.B.

"The magnitude, and the fact that so many illegals were involved, was a shock to me," said Oleg D. Kalugin, a former K.G.B. general who was a Soviet spy in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s under "legal" cover as a diplomat and Radio Moscow correspondent.

"It's a return to the old days, but even in the worst years of the cold war, I think there were no more than 10 illegals in the U.S., probably fewer."

Mr. Kalugin, now an American citizen living outside Washington, said he was impressed with the F.B.I.'s penetration of the spy ring.

The criminal complaints are packed with vivid details gathered in years of covert surveillance -- including monitoring phones and e-mail, placing secret microphones in the alleged Russian agents' homes, and numerous surreptitious searches.

The authorities also tracked one set of agents based in Yonkers on trips to an unidentified South American country, where they were videotaped receiving bags of cash and passing messages written in invisible ink to Russian handlers in a public park, according to the charges.


Borrowed from a NY Times article...

Here's the link for the 2nd half of the story...

In Ordinary Lives, U.S. Sees the Work of Russian Agents - NYTimes.com