A day after the Obama Administration arrested 10 people across the U.S. on charges of being Russian spies, the Russian Foreign Ministry has dismissed the roundup as “completely unfounded,” and alleged that the accusations have been made “in the spirit of cold war spy mania.” There is no doubt that the latter is true, though this does not appear to be the fault of the FBI. The charging documents, filed by the Department of Justice, at times verge on purple prose, with alleged spies recorded talking to each other in dialog that even Hollywood might not accept as credible. If the accusations prove to be true, the biggest lesson from this entire episode may be that real-life spies today act just like fictional spies from the 1980s. Here are eight highlights from the charging documents, as alleged by the FBI:
1. Russian spies talk just like you expect spies to talk. Messages from Moscow Central, the headquarters of the successor to the KGB, ended “destroy the memo after reading.” In face-to-face meetings, the accused used all kinds of funky code words, with conversations so contrived that if you overheard them you would surely suspect something illegal was afoot. “You will meet this guy,” one spy at a Sunnyside, New York, restaurant tells another, according to an FBI bug. “Tell him Uncle Paul loves him . . . he will know . . . It is wonderful to be Santa Claus in May.” Similarly, when greeting contacts for the first time, the spies used wooden language to confirm identities. For example: “ ‘Excuse me, did we meet in Bangkok in April last year?’ Reply: ‘I don’t know about April, but I was in Thailand in May of that year.’ ”
2. Brand matters, and Russian spies apparently see TIME magazine as something like a universal signifier. (This gives an entirely new meaning to the red border, one Henry Luce surely did not intend.) In January of this year, Moscow Center allegedly sent a message to one of its assets, Richard Murphy, to tell him how to meet a contact in Rome, who would deliver a fake Irish passport so Murphy could travel to Moscow. In the message, Murphy was identified as “A.”
A’s recognition sign: “Time” magazine in A’s hands (title to be seen from outside). Sign of danger: “Time” magazine in A’s left hand (title to be seen from outside).
The criminal complaint does not have details of this meeting, though the FBI says Murphy did fly to Rome between February 21, 2010 and March 3, 2010. If he carried a recent issue of TIME, here are the options.
3. The Russian spies allegedly tried to pass information in all kinds of groovy ways, from the old fashion (Morse Code-like radio signals) to the downright Bohemian (syncing Mac computers in a New York bookstore). They also used Steganography—the concealing of messages in images–which should become the word of the week. Don’t be surprised if Steganography shows up on an upcoming episode of Jeopardy, under “Cold War lingo for $600.” The images in question, with hidden messages, were posted on “publicly-available websites.” Happy hunting.
