'Your papers, please' must never be heard in America
They posed as ordinary citizens, living daily, nondescript lives in communities from Arlington, Va., to Yonkers, N.Y. They were married couples with car payments, monthly rents, and telephone and medical bills. They bought computers, gave gifts and ate occasionally in restaurants.
"While there does seem to be a Keystone Kops nature to all this — and I am skeptical that people like this could get the real access they were looking for — part of their portfolio would have been to seek out those who could be useful," he said.
Mr. Kuchins, an internationally recognized expert on Russian foreign and domestic policies and a director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he is "not surprised" by the arrests, adding that U.S. intelligence officials have known for some time that Russian intelligence agents are "as active today as any time during the Cold War."
