A ring of 10-12 Russian spies was broken up yesterday by the FBI after a seven year investigation. They were Cold War “moles” that had infiltrated normal neighborhoods like Montclair, NJ, Cambridge, MA and other towns across the USA. It also appears that the way the spies went about their business was right out of the movies.
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 each other 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.
They even had the sexy redheaded siren.
Stories like this just fascinate me. The way the covert operations from CIA and FBI go about identifying these rings and understanding the signals that the spies use to communicate is just so cool. Makes you want to channel your inner Austin Millbarge and Emmit Fitz-Hume