Espionage Nostalgia

Neither East nor West @ 05.07.2010, 16:30

vberezansky

Financial analyst

Ironically, this quote is generally attributed to Karl Marx, who may have ‘borrowed’ this wisdom from an earlier source such as Hegel.  Watching the increasingly circuitous arguments between fiscal conservatives and Keynesians has led us all to an intellectual dead end.  The most recent meeting of the G20 nations in Toronto has only heightened our awareness of the lack of consensus in how best to pull the economies of the G20 member countries out of the current structural malaise.  And the by now quaint bickering between NATO and Russia serves to emphasize that both sides seem to be fighting wars of yesteryear while real threats to world peace such as Iran, North Korea and China flex their newfound muscles.
 
Just as Mike Myers’ film character Austin Powers skewers the iconic James Bond, the FBI’s recent arrest of ten Russian ‘sleepers’ appears as a silly echo of the Cold War legacy of espionage.  Like a geriatric pair of professional tango dangers who won’t leave the floor, the FBI and Russian intelligence – the Foreign Intelligence Service or SVR, in this case – seem to be performing their roles on autopilot.  No, wait, I’ve seen this film before!  Many times, in fact. Shaken, not stirred, right?  
 
Despite the protests of the American side to the contrary, there does not seem to be a clear reason why these ten ‘agents’ were arrested specifically at this time.  Of course the US Government prosecutors can hide any weaknesses or – gasp! – incompetence behind a screen of TOP SECRET classifications.  That is a time-honoured tradition, and not just in the United States.
 
As if these low-yield arrests weren’t low enough comedy, one of the bad guys – an eleventh man – slipped away from the ever-vigilant grasp of the Cypriot government.  Given a choice, I’d certainly prefer to sip raki in Kyrenia than to model one of the US Government’s famous orange jumpsuits, complete with leg chains.
 
Purely as a business proposition, it is difficult to understand what Russia’s intelligence masters in Moscow expected to gather from having a network of faux soccer parents ‘infiltrate’ upper middle class suburbs of Boston, New York, and in Northern Virginia. What possible intelligence yield could merit supporting this lifestyle for decades?  Not surprisingly, a significant amount of traffic intercepted by the FBI represents trans-Atlantic bickering over this very subject.  Once again, fact proves more banal than fiction.  FBI-released excerpts of niggling over expenses incurred by these agents show that this was no Mr. & Mrs. Smith existence for these Brangelina wannabees.
 
This is a situation where both the French and the Germans have conspired to dig the espionage equivalent of The Maginot Line – a conspiracy of incompetence.  Common sense indicates that if such a network is discovered in your country, you should allow it to operate for as long as possible until you’ve caught the sleepers processing intelligence worthy of an espionage conviction.  Why would the FBI go to the trouble of monitoring their operations for eight years but fail to produce any evidence of real espionage?  Was a key FBI agent retiring, and perhaps he wanted a promotion before receiving his pension?  Why didn’t the FBI feed these quasi-spies false intelligence that would have met the American legal threshold test for espionage?
 
But all joking aside, there is a real tragedy here.  The children of these agents, some as young as one and three years old, have had their lives devastated – to the point where it turns out that several of them apparently weren’t aware of their ‘real’ names or citizenship (judging by the loyalties of their parents).  As a purely legal question, whether any of these sleeper offspring might qualify as US citizens remains unclear.  If their parents were living and working in the United States – some for more than a decade – under false pretenses (illegally), then their children have highly questionable claims to American citizenship – even if, in the end, that is what they might want for themselves.  In this instance, there is no avoiding the sins of the father.
 
Perhaps the strongest evidence of globalisation is the globalisation of the Short Attention-Span Syndrome.  The entire world taps nervously on its television remote control and flits through the Internet with its collective computer mouse and Blackberry ball, unable to focus at length on any specific bit of sensationalist news.  Crude oil gushes out of the Gulf of Mexico; another upset in the World Cup in South Africa replaces our surprise at another upset at Wimbledon; another scandal in Britain’s dysfunctional Royal Family deflects our attention from Tiger Woods; and Lady Gaga did something more outrageous than Paris Hilton this week.  In six months’ time only those directly affected by this misnamed spy scandal will be interested in the fates of these ten or eleven hapless principals.
 
The irony within an irony is that both the American and Russian governments prefer to play down this incident.  There was no exchange of expulsions from the respective Russian and American diplomatic representations in the other country.  Given the American prosecution’s thin dossier, the convictions – if, indeed, the American legal system chooses to convict these (what?) sneaky guests – may lead to minimal prison sentences.  Russia and America will no doubt continue spying on each other; but one questions why these battles seem so ruthless when the stakes are so low.