The FBI and KBG are still playing the old games.
The Bureau, which failed to anticipate the Times Square bomber, has been relentlessly tracking Russian agents posing as suburban homeowners for years, and the former spymaster Vladimir Putin is kvetching about it
“Back at your home,” he tells another retiree, Bill Clinton, drawing a laugh, “the police went out of control throwing people in jail. But that’s the kind of job they have.”
The indictment of 11 “deep cover” agents recalls the days when Americans were kept aware of potentially dangerous neighbors by that expert on secret lives, J. Edgar Hoover.
The news has a Rip Van Winkle feel to it, as if the FBI were awakening from a decades-long nap, unaware of this month’s visit by the Russian president, who was warmly greeted in the White House, shared cheeseburgers with the President and was given a tour of Silicon Valley as well as the 21st-century imperative of derailing Middle East terrorism rather than Communist subversion.
Thousands of surveillance hours produced not charges of espionage but of acting as “unauthorized foreign agents and conspiracy to commit money laundering”–not quite as alarming as planting bombs in midtown Manhattan, but in the arcane world of spycraft, who can tell?
The indicated conspirators spent years living in American suburbs while, according to prosecutors, penetrating American “policy making circles.”