this shit is fascinating:
American officials said they believed that most of the accused spies had been born in Russia and had been given sophisticated training before resettling in the United States, posing as married couples. They connected with various Americans of influence or knowledge, including a “prominent New York-based financier” described as a political fund-raiser with personal ties to a cabinet official, a former high-ranking national security official, and a nuclear weapons expert.
Richard Murphy, was told to meet an intelligence operative in Rome for a "brush past" meeting, at which he would be handed a fake Irish passport for his onward journey to Russia.
This involved Murphy meeting an SVR (Russian foreign intelligence agency) agent outside a bookshop on a quiet street just south of Rome's city centre.
The agent was to identify Murphy by a copy of Time magazine he was holding, and give him the coded message: "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?"
Murphy was to reply, "Yes indeed, I was in La Valetta, but in 2000", before being given the passport.
Criminal complaints filed in U.S. district court Monday read like an old-fashioned Cold War thriller: Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past one another in a train station stairwell; an identity borrowed from a dead Canadian, forged passports of several countries, letters sent by shortwave burst transmission or in invisible
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ink; a money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York.
But the network of so-called illegals — spies operating under false names outside of the usual diplomatic cover — also used cyberage technology, according to the charges. They embedded coded texts in ordinary-looking images posted on the Internet, and they communicated by having two agents with laptops containing special software pass as messages flashed between them.
American officials said they believed that most of the accused spies had been born in Russia and had been given sophisticated training before resettling in the United States, posing as married couples. They connected with various Americans of influence or knowledge, including a “prominent New York-based financier” described as a political fund-raiser with personal ties to a cabinet official, a former high-ranking national security official, and a nuclear weapons expert.
Richard Murphy, was told to meet an intelligence operative in Rome for a "brush past" meeting, at which he would be handed a fake Irish passport for his onward journey to Russia.
This involved Murphy meeting an SVR (Russian foreign intelligence agency) agent outside a bookshop on a quiet street just south of Rome's city centre.
The agent was to identify Murphy by a copy of Time magazine he was holding, and give him the coded message: "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?"
Murphy was to reply, "Yes indeed, I was in La Valetta, but in 2000", before being given the passport.
Criminal complaints filed in U.S. district court Monday read like an old-fashioned Cold War thriller: Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past one another in a train station stairwell; an identity borrowed from a dead Canadian, forged passports of several countries, letters sent by shortwave burst transmission or in invisible
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Click here to find out more!
ink; a money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York.
But the network of so-called illegals — spies operating under false names outside of the usual diplomatic cover — also used cyberage technology, according to the charges. They embedded coded texts in ordinary-looking images posted on the Internet, and they communicated by having two agents with laptops containing special software pass as messages flashed between them.
Yeah, the whole thing's great; proper old-school Cold War intrigue, love it.
