Leave it to the Russians to not understand that the Cold War is dead and buried. The 10 alleged deep-cover operatives who were arrested on Monday may number more spies than were here in the 1950s, when there was a real possibility of war between the U.S. and Russia. (An 11th suspect was apprehended in Cyprus but released on bail.) You have to wonder what the Russians could have been thinking to spend the tens of millions of dollars that such an espionage infrastructure costs. Were they planning for a new Cold War? The other odd thing is that the suspected Russian operatives seem to have been stuck with a Cold War spy's craft, with secret writing, dead drops and money stashes. What was wrong with flying to Europe to meet your control officer once a month? On top of that, there was a comic sloppiness to the whole operation. At one point, an undercover FBI agent introduced himself to one of the suspects, claiming to be a substitute-control officer. Not only did the alleged Russian operative fall for it, she didn't notice that afterward, she was followed by more undercover FBI agents to a Verizon store, where they observed her buying a prepaid phone card. They then observed her as she apparently dropped the Verizon bag into a trash can — with the receipt in it. The name on it was Irene Kutsov — not the Americanized alias she reportedly used in the U.S. — and the address “99 Fake Street.” Indeed, the suspects were not charged with espionage but, much less glamorously, conspiring to act as unauthorized foreign agents and conspiring to commit money laundering. Moscow has called the accusations baseless. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2000396,00.html?xid=rss-topstorie… added by: Sexirobot
