US busts Russian spy ring
Charges 11 people with carrying out deep-cover work
They had lived for more than a decade in American cities and suburbs from Seattle to New York, where they seemed to be ordinary couples working ordinary jobs, chatting to the neighbours about schools and apologising for noisy teenagers.
But on Monday, federal prosecutors accused 11 people of being part of a Russian espionage ring, living under false names and deep cover in a patient scheme to penetrate what one coded message called American “policy-making circles.”
An FBI investigation that began at least seven years ago culminated with the arrest on Sunday of 10 people in Yonkers, Boston and northern Virginia. The documents detailed what the authorities called the “Illegals Programme,” an ambitious, long-term effort by the SVR, the successor to the Soviet KGB, to plant Russian spies in the United States to gather information and recruit more agents.
The alleged agents were directed to gather information on nuclear weapons, American policy towards Iran, CIA leadership, Congressional politics and many other topics, prosecutors say. The Russian spies made contact with a former high-ranking American national security official and a nuclear weapons researcher, among others. But the charges did not include espionage, and it was unclear what secrets the suspected spy ring — which included five couples — actually managed to collect.
After years of FBI surveillance, investigators decided to make the arrests last weekend, just days after an upbeat visit to President Obama by the Russian president, Dmitri A Medvedev.
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.
Neighbours in Montclair, New Jersey, of the couple who called themselves Richard and Cynthia Murphy were flabbergasted when a team of FBI agents turned up on Sunday night and led the couple away in handcuffs. One person who lives nearby called them “suburbia personified.” Others worried about the Murphys’ elementary-age daughters.
The New York Times
Baseless, fumes Moscow
Russia on Tuesday said US allegations that it had broken up a major Russian spy ring just days after President Dmitry Medvedev met Barack Obama in Washington were baseless and improper, Reuters reports.
“Such actions are baseless and improper,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement. “We do not understand what prompted the US to make a public statement in the spirit of Cold War espionage.”
“We deeply regret that all of this has happened against the background of the relations reset declared by the US administration,” it said.
