Mediocrity of Russian spy ring reflects country's decadence

WASHINGTON — Some of the commentary on the Russian agents recently captured by the FBI has centered on the fact that Moscow was spying on the United States while President Barack Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev celebrated their nuclear and diplomatic partnership at Ray's Hell Burger, or on the evolving focus of Russia's intelligence services. But all of this misses the real point: how much the mediocrity of the spy ring reveals about the decadence of present-day Russia.

It is not surprising that Russia spies on the U.S. while cooperation occurs in many areas — the nuclear deal, the sanctions against Iran, the suspension of the anti-missile shield in Central Europe. All states spy, and friends spy on each other, too — even Israeli agents, including Jonathan Pollard, have been caught in the United States.

Equally unsurprising is that Moscow should pursue nonmilitary and nonpolitical targets. Industrial espionage by Russia is as old as Vladimir Lenin. Commercial and technological intelligence may have become a top priority in the time since the Berlin Wall fell, but it was also a key part of the information-gathering apparatus of the communists. One of the missions of Markus Wolf's Stasi, East Germany's notorious intelligence service, was to steal industrial secrets from West Germany, as he explains in his memoirs.

The problem with the latest bunch of moles was not that they placed pictures on Facebook (Anna Chapman), were futurist technology geeks (Donald Heathfield), were travel agents (Mikhail Semenko), were barbecue-grilling suburbanites (Richard and Cynthia Murphy) or penned leftist columns in New York's El Diario La Prensa (Vicky Pelaez). Actually, these seem like pretty good covers. Yet by all accounts, none of the spooks really did much besides what it looked like they were doing. Apparently they milked Russia's budget for nothing, a delicious irony if one thinks of Russia's pervasive venality: Transparency International places the country on a par with Zimbabwe in its Corruption Perceptions Index.

Everything about the spies was comically passe, including the technology — bags exchanged in train stations, shortwave radio, invisible ink. It all begs the question: Why did the FBI expose them before they were able to do anything substantive for their paymasters? The fact that the U.S. has exchanged the spies for four agents of Western countries imprisoned by Moscow suggests these amateur spooks are simply bargaining chips — or meant to send Russia the message that not even amateur spooks will be tolerated on U.S. soil.