I am such an unpatriotic American, when I first heard about the Illegals Eleven arrests, I’ll admit I was dubious of the timing. In our Total Information Awareness Era, nothing says “Eff you, Obama, and your Russkie-hugging DFH ways” like scheduling the disclosure of a ten-year multi-agency survelliance operation to coincide with a media-friendly state visit by the Russian President. Especially when the the announced charges against the ten defendents and one fugitive amount to “conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the U.S. attorney general” (maximum penalty: five years) and “conspiracy to commit money laundering” (max charge: 20 years, under post-9/11 ‘anti-terrorist’ codes intended to guarantee that any individual suspect could be brought into custody quickly and conveniently without a lot of loose talk about their so-called Constitutional rights). Of course, this is just reflexive tin-foil-hattery; both William J. Casey and J. Edgar Hoover have been dead for many years, and there’s only so much one man, even a man like Dick Cheney, could have done to reinstate the ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan days of OSS hijinks during a mere eight years.
The Washington Post reports:
… Federal law enforcement officials portrayed their operation as a spectacular counterintelligence success that uncovered a group of spies capable of doing great damage to U.S. national security. “I can’t remember a case where we’ve been able to arrest 10 intelligence officers from a foreign country in one fell swoop,” one official said. “This network in the United States has now been completely compromised.”
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But other officials said the Russian network appears to have accomplished little, if any, of its espionage aims, even though some of the suspects had lived in this country for up to two decades. “These are people trying to get inside the tent that you would expect to see more charges on if they had succeeded in doing so,” said one U.S. official familiar with the investigation, who added, “It certainly is a wake-up call” for those on the alert for Russian spying.
I’m sure that as this narrative unfolds, we will all have reason to be grateful for the FBI’s viligiant and unwavering devotion to duty. News stories about the current details, however, share a certain Graham-Greene-ish aura. The BBC titled an article “Cold War meets 21st century meets ‘burger summit'”
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… Some of what they were said to be after, like information about nuclear “bunker-buster” warheads, seems rather serious. The Department of Justice has, however, made clear that none of the information at stake was classified. In fact it is a bit unclear what the suspects actually managed to get their hands on…