Spy Story Exhaustion

It sure didn’t take long, but I am pretty well exhausted by reading the latest article on Anna Chapman’s favorite singles bar or combing Mikhail Semenko’s LinkIn profile for meaningless details.  Julia Ioffe gets it right in her latest piece on The Daily Beast – there’s just not much more to learn from this slapstick discussion.

First of all, there is a spy ring that is tasked with gleaning “information on the U.S. position with respect to a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty“… from New Jersey. Federal agents describe two operatives who can barely use their computers, and talk with awe of a super high-tech, state-of-the-art communication device known as the WiFi. Invisible ink makes an appearance in the complaint as does Morse Code, which, of course, is pretty uncrackable. And then there are the spies who bury cash in an open field and pass sensitive (think tank?) data to each other publicly… in bright orange bags. Not to mention the awkward Mata Hari, Anna Chapman, who buys a temporary Verizon phone using a fake name and the fake address at “99 Fake Street.”

Russians note that this motley crew hasn’t even been charged with spying. Instead, they stand accused of failing to register as foreign agents (maximum sentence five years) and money laundering (which could carry 20). And reading this complaint, it seems much more likely that a rogue element in the Russian secret service needed to launder some stolen cash and stumbled on some starry-eyed American suburban yokels and asked: “Hey, wanna be a spy?”

The American press is loudly invoking the late Le Carré. But to the Russians, it feels a lot more like Pink Panther. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out that these spies are as real as Saddam’s atomic bomb,” Markov says, once again laughing.