Spies Like us

Twenty years from now after Obama and Medvedev have long since retired from office and get together to chat, they’ll probably get a good laugh from the episode. Remember that spying affair in the summer of 2010 that nearly torpedoed our efforts at cooperation? For the present, they have to grin and bear something that shows surprisingly more amateurism than it does maliciousness.

The most enduring lesson learned from the headlines accompanying last week’s arrest of a suspected Russian spy ring in the United States was that Obama and Medvedev have no intention of making an international incident out of it. They’re doing everything possible to ensure nothing hinders their policy of the reset button – the new beginning of U.S.-Russian relations. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin fully supports this effort as well. That in itself is remarkable in view of the still unsolved puzzle of whether the ex-KGB chief and President Medvedev are engaged in a power struggle involving distinctly separate foreign policies, or whether they’re just putting that image on for public consumption because the “good cop–bad cop” routine serves Russian interests.

Otherwise, the turn of events is merely confusing as well as damaging to another iconic organization. The KGB once had a reputation as a dangerous intelligence service able to place its agents into key positions in the West. What we know about these eleven Russian spies so far makes the whole affair seem more like a crime comedy than a secret service thriller. For years, Russian couples led middle class American lives, living in their own homes in respectable suburbs of New York, Boston and Washington, D.C., all bought and paid for by the Russian government without ever having sent back the first bit of sensitive information. They didn’t damage America; they swindled Russia. That’s the laughable state of affairs in Russian foreign intelligence these days. And that has to be more painful to Vladimir Putin than any busted spy ring.