The Russian spy story really is a blast from the past. It's like all the participants had been watching a lot of cold war movies and reading Le Carre thrillers and thought, hey, we should bring spying back home. All this modern satellite stuff, this talk of data encryption, is dull and dehumanising. Let's stand up for the old ways! Let's rage against the machine!
We'll get our money from buried paper bags:
“METSOS secretly buried some of the money in upstate New York,” the FBI affidavit says, referring to one of the defendants, “and two years later, in 2006, the Seattle Conspirators flew to New York and dug it up.”
We'll have cryptic conversations:
Moscow Center’s instructions were explicit: For the meeting in Rome, its American spy would approach a stranger and ask, "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?" "Yes indeed,” the answer should be. “I was in La Valetta, but in 2000.” According to Moscow’s instructions, the stranger would then slip the spy a false Irish passport, for travel on to Russia.
We'll make concessions to technology but only as long as we can use it in a way that you can imagine in a movie:
The affidavit also describes how “Russian Government Official #3 surreptitiously gave cash and a flash memory stick to RICHARD MURPHY," the defendant, during a "brush pass" at a New York-area train station. Just like it sounds, a “brush pass” of messages and money is executed swiftly, face to face.
We'll inhabit whole new identities:
But the FBI may never find out who they really are, because of another tried and true technique Moscow Center uses, according to the affidavit: obtaining the birth certificates of dead Canadians and Americans, with which they can build a whole new, false “legend” for their spies. The FBI affidavit turns up several. That trick, too, is as old as the hills, with an added virtue. Unlike the others, it could well prevent the FBI from ever finding out exactly who all these people really are.
Now we're caught, should we defect?
Link to Jeff Stein's summary of the case.
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