Epic epic fail on behalf on the USA security establishment. At least you fixed it now I suppose.
U.S. Arrests 10 on Charges of Being Agents for Russia
In what law enforcement officials portrayed as an extraordinary takedown of a Russian espionage network, the Justice Department on Monday announced charges against 11 people accused of living for years in the United States as part of a deep-cover program run by S.V.R. — the successor agency to the Soviet-era K.G.B.
Criminal complaints filed in federal court on Monday read like a thriller: secret Russian agents assigned to live as married couples in the United States, even having children to further their cover. Spies swapping identical bags as they pass each other in a stairwell. Invisible writing and codes. Money caches buried for years in a rural field.
The complaints followed a multi-year investigation that culminated with the arrest on Sunday of 10 people in Yonkers, Boston, and northern Virginia. The documents detailed what authorities called the “Illegals Program,” an S.V.R. effort to plant Russian spies in the United States to gather information and recruit people able to infiltrate government policy-making circles.
The “Illegals Program” extended to other countries around the world, the charging documents said.
The 11 defendants were charged with conspiring to act as agents of a foreign government without registering with the Justice Department, and 9 of them were also charged with conspiracy to commit money laundering. The complaints do not include charges of stealing any secrets.
Using fraudulent documents, the complaints said, the spies would “assume identities as citizens or legal residents of the countries to which they are deployed, including the United States.” It continued, “Illegals will sometimes pursue degrees at target-country universities, obtain employment, and join relevant professional associations” to deepen their false identities.
“Illegals often operate in pairs — being placed together by Moscow Center” — the S.V.R. headquarters — “while in Russia, so that they can live together and work together in a host country, under the guise of a married couple,” the Justice Department said in the complaints. “Illegals who are placed together and co-habit in the country to which they are assigned will often have children together,” further establishing their cover.
Once planted in their host country, the agents’ lives would be entirely financed by the Russian government — an arrangement that sometimes led to friction, the complaint said, citing an acrimonious exchange of encrypted messages between a New Jersey couple who wanted to own a house into which they had recently moved, and the S.V.R., which wanted to maintain control of the house.
The agents eventually dropped the argument, writing: “We are under the impression that C. views our ownership of the house as a deviation from the original purpose of our mission here. We’d like to assure you that we do remember what it is. From our perspective, purchase of the house was solely a natural progression of our prolonged stay here. It was a convenient way to solve the housing issue, plus to ‘do as the Romans do’ in a society that values home ownership.”
