With the end of the Cold War nearly two decades ago, we don’t hear so much anymore about spies and espionage. That topic is mainly the province of novels and movies nowadays.
But it would be a dangerous mistake to assume that spies are no longer on U.S. soil, testing our nation for weaknesses which the nations that hired the spies might exploit to harm us.
We were reminded of that with the recent arrests of 10 people in the Northeastern United States on charges of acting as undercover agents of a foreign government — Russia. Some appear to be Russian citizens. The citizenship of some others seems unclear. An 11th suspect, a Canadian citizen, was arrested on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus while trying to board a plane for Hungary.
Of course, many foreigners work legitimately in the United States, with the full knowledge and consent of our government. But the people arrested recently were certainly not in that category. They are accused of using everything from invisible ink to encrypted data to coded radio transmissions in order to collect sensitive political and other information on the United States and U.S. officials. Not surprisingly, they seemed particularly interested in getting “the inside scoop” on the Obama administration’s views of Russia.
If the suspects were in fact spies, what information did they manage to gather during their years in this country? And was Russia the only nation to which they may have passed along that information? We may not know the full extent of their alleged activities — or the possible harm they may have done to our national security — for a long time, if ever.
They are now in our criminal justice system, however, and we hope the judicial system will be able to ferret out the facts of this troubling case.