Yesterday, the U.S. Justice Department accused 11 people of spying for the Russian Federation. The formal charge is “conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government” and nine of the defendants are also charged with “conspiracy to commit money laundering.” (You can read the legal paperwork here and here.) These arrests follow a multi-year investigation by the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office, and the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
Having spent so much time following these 11 people, bugging their houses and secretly scanning their home electronics, U.S. authorities have at last brought down the hammer—hours after Russian President Dmitri Medvedev left North American airspace and days after a warmly received visit to California and Washington, D.C. This international scandal comes during a period of “reset” dizziness—as the United States commits to Russian entry into the World Trade Organization, Russia agrees to renew U.S. poultry imports, and both nations come nearer to ratifying the New START treaty on arms reductions. Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov have responded cautiously so far, though the Kremlin’s patience for espionage accusations—true or false—is notoriously thin.
The feds now have 11 people in custody who might be guilty of receiving money and passing it among each other illegally. The “unregistered foreign agents” charge carries a maximum penalty of only five years in prison. The details of the money laundering are almost comical. We have people burying bags of cash in roadside ditches, marked by dirty beer bottles. There are bag-exchanges in public parks, and dollar-filled fanny packs. The secrecy with which these individuals operated has the appearance of a (bad) spy novel; the results of this conspiracy are closer to “Naked Gun” than James Bond. Indeed, one of the top-secret communiqués intercepted includes complaints about the low quality of their reporting. “They tell me that my information is of no value because I didn’t provide any source,” one suspect tells another. “Put down any politician!” she answers.
These “sleeper agents” or “moles,” as they used to be called during the Cold War—residents of the United States for years, some of whom have even had children here, apparently to improve their “cover”—are hardly the super spies from Tom Clancy. From what we know thus far, it appears that this was a “softer” wide-net operation. Its design was not to ferret out the “hard” secrets (à la Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen), but to see how policy is made—how the government interacts with Congress and think tanks. This was not about silent engines for nuclear subs, anti-submarine warfare plans, or torpedo designs, but about how the United States manages to revolutionalize its technology—a keen interest underscored by Medvedev’s visit to Silicon Valley last week. In other words, both in the political and technological sides of the operation, Russians here appear to be not after the sausage but sausage-making. (And speaking of sausages—all right, hamburgers—one wonders if chatting with President Obama in an Arlington joint was Medvedev’s contribution to the operation…)
In a sense, this was more sophisticated “research” than we typically see from Moscow. Still, the entire thing is a bit bizarre. If the Kremlin uses its spies this way, what are their diplomats for? And why didn’t they just read The Times or The Post, or simply ride the D.C. conference circuit?
The impact on U.S.-Russian relations is likely to be minimal. If Ames or Hanssen (whom Moscow paid hundreds of thousand dollars) did not cause any upheavals, then this graduate-school-level operation is very unlikely to be a great destabilizer. Countries, even friendly ones, engage in this sort of thing all the time, we are likely to be told. True enough, except for a typical Soviet-like overkill with the thickness of the “cover.” The only (minor) intrigue is why the arrests came so shortly after Medvedev’s visit? Are we going to hear from Moscow about the “reactionary forces” again at work trying to undermine the fragile détente of the “reset”? Stay tuned.
Image by Tony the Misfit
After a two-day tour of California’s Silicon Valley, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev visited Washington yesterday to meet with President Obama. The trip was rather unusual, as Medvedev and his entourage traveled to America’s tech capital on something of a scouting mission. The agenda? To survey the high-tech landscape in order to deduce the secrets of the trade. Also, Medvedev came to pitch Russia as a place to invest American dollars: notably in Skolkovo, the Kremlin’s in-development, state-led copy of Silicon Valley. In this latter task, it seems the Russian leader managed a significant achievement with the