MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“They’re not the spies of old” Ellis Henican Column, amNewYork, July 9, 2010
OK, here’s the deal I would have struck: We send the Russians their 10 spies back. They send us imprisoned scientist Igor Sutyagin—plus nine Russian gymnasts.
You can’t say we don’t need the help at the 2012 Summer Games!
After their guilty pleas in Manhattan federal court Thursday, the hapless snooping suburbanites were expected to leave New York immediately for Moscow. Sidestepping the threat of long prison terms, they had good reason to feel relieved. But how much longer till the bilateral regret seeps in?
Will the bumbling coconspirators really enjoy their brand-new lives in drab Moscow apartments? Will the comely Anna Chapman happily trade the pleasures of New York tabloid stardom for the earnest service of what’s become of the KGB? Will a few naked pictures go quite so far in Mother Russia?
Not likely.
These latter-day Russians spies were so inept they couldn’t even be charged with espionage. They had everything a good spy should — techno-gizmos, false identities, secret rendezvous and the requisite sexy babe: Everything, that is, except for secrets.
These palookas could have found out more with a Wikipedia search and a “Schoolhouse Rock” CD.
By the time they got to federal court, even the money-laundering counts were dropped. The relatively minor offense they admitted to — acting as an illegal foreign agent — was the kind that’s usually reserved for a lobbyist who doesn’t fill out the proper paperwork. This was hardly the stuff of Cold War nightmares.
How serious could their offenses be if the United States Justice Department and U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood agreed to a plea deal as gentle as this: a quick flight to Moscow and a sentence of time served?
Clearly, these cul-de-sac snoops fail to measure up to the secret-agent standards of the Cold War. It isn’t clear they knew how to crack the code that is a subway map or an auto GPS.
Here’s hoping the spies we’re getting back are better than the ones we’re trading away. But just as insurance, let’s insist on the gymnasts, OK?
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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