Thinking about some history while considering those just-arrested Russian spies

The arrest this past week of 11 people, allegedly Russian spies, piqued my interest especially because I have been following American-Russian espionage since the early 1980s, when I collaborated with Robert J. Lamphere on “The FBI-KGB War.â€�  Bob had been the FBI’s KGB expert and head of its counterintelligence efforts in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

What struck me immediately about the current network was their affinity for social media. They used it not only to utilize contacts, but to foster their efforts to appear harmless.

The 1930 and 1940s networks in the United States and Canada run by Jacob Golos, and “illegalsâ€� such as Rudolph Abel in the 1950s, worked hard to remain nearly invisible in society.  Today, to be so squirrelly would make neighbors and coworkers curious, so hiding in LinkedIn and Facebook helped maintain the spies’ cover.

I was also struck by how little the spies had accomplished, given the adequacy of their cover, their length of time in country, and their opportunities to get cozy with potential sources.  They are not charged with espionage, only with lesser crimes; so far as we know at present, they did not obtain classified information, recruit agents, or compromise American citizens; although, as Jeff Stein pointed out in the Washington Post, the 28-year-old beautiful divorcee Anna Chapman seems to have been well positioned for securing secrets and compromising politicos.  (She says the FBI tried to lure her with an agent posed as a Russian consul, asking her to deliver a faked passport.)  

Despite the best efforts of the spies’ likely sponsor, ex-KGB man Vladimir Putin, they remained fairly harmless during their decade in residence, which is undoubtedly why the FBI and CIA decided to let them run as long as possible.  

We were getting more info from them than they were from us, and were likely feeding them false information to pass to Moscow, until it became necessary to roll them up before they got away.

 Also interesting has been the reaction from Moscow.  Vladimir Putin and others initially accused Washington of having once more come down with Cold War fever.  Two days later, the Russian government reassured the United States that the incident would not deter the two countries’ relations, and went so far as to admit that those arrested were indeed Russians.  

However, I anticipate that some Americans or other Westerners residing in Russia being swept up and jailed by Moscow in the near future — just as former U.S. Navy Captain Edmond D. Pope was in 2000, in Putin’s attempt to consolidate power after his election. (I collaborated with Ed on “Torpedoed,� published only a few months after his release from a Russian prison.)

 So what was behind the Russian espionage?  Josef Stalin was infamous for refusing to value any information obtained from legit sources, and for highly valuing stolen info.

That attitude seems to have prevailed in Moscow in this instance, as the spies’ sponsoring agency, the SVR, could have obtained virtually everything that their agents extracted from the United States if they had been good trawlers of the Internet and borrowed some tomes from big-city public libraries.

I look forward to confessions from some of the arrested that they gave Moscow just a bit of info, now and then, so that they could continue on partying in America the beautiful.

Back in 1952, when Lamphere learned of the existence of an illegal in New York City — through a message concealed in a hollowed-out nickel accidentally received by a Brooklyn newsboy — he couldn’t obtain permission from his superiors to pursue the man eventually exposed in 1957 as KGB Col. Rudolph Abel, a very effective spy. In the present instance, U.S. authorities, acting on what the complaint describes as “judicially authorized interceptions of telephonic communications,â€� in January 2000 videotaped Vicky Palaez in a South American park receiving $80,000 from a suspicious person and then phoning Juan Lazaro in the U.S. to confirm the transaction.  

That would have been enough to start the surveillance ball rolling, but my guess is that the U.S. agencies’ massively expensive effort to keep tabs on her, and on the others in the group, would not have been sustained but for the passage, in the fall of 2001, of the U.S.A. PATRIOT Act, which allows the FBI to do things well beyond J. Edgar Hoover’s wildest dreams.

Tom Shachtman has written books on a wide range of topics. He lives in Salisbury.