Washington, June 30: The endgame came last Saturday, on a sweltering early summer afternoon in downtown Washington. The year was 2010, but the Cold War might never have ended. The FBI undercover agent, purporting to be a Russian government official, and a suburban travel agency employee named Mikhail Semenko met on a street corner six blocks east of the White House, and exchanged pre-arranged code phrases. “Could we have met in Beijing in 2004? Yes, we might have, but I believe it was in Harbin.”
With the formalities out of the way, the pair got down to serious business, discussing problems with communications equipment, before the undercover agent gave Semenko a newspaper folded around an envelope containing $5,000. The package was to be dropped off at an agreed spot in a park in suburban Arlington the following day.
Semenko carried out his instructions. Within hours he was arrested along with nine other people across north-eastern US, all of them accused of belonging to a network of Russian deep-cover secret agents, spying on the United States. Whatever else, the operation had not been rushed; some of the alleged agents had been living here since the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union was still warm in its grave. The FBI, court papers show, had been on the case since at least 2004.
–Agencies