Shocked, Shocked that the Russian Federation would commit economic espionage...Damn those sanctions working...perhaps he was recruiting Rand/Ron Paul supporters since they admire Putin so much. Spionen, Smiert Spionen Comrade Bond.
An alleged Russian spy posing as a banker in Manhattan has been arrested, federal officials said today. The banker, identified in a criminal complaint as Evgeny Buryakov, is accused of working with agents of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, the SVR, as a “non-official cover” agent.
Federal prosecutors arrested a Russian banker in New York on Monday and charged him as a spy, accusing him and two others of secretly gathering information about the New York Stock Exchange, U.S. energy resources and sanctions against Moscow.
Prosecutors described clandestine meetings and coded communications between the banker and his handlers, one of whom worked as a trade representative of the Russian Federation in New York, the other as an attaché to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation to the United Nations.
The spycraft alleged in the complaint reads like a throwback to the Cold War. Yet the alleged operatives’ target was more modern: economic intelligence.
According to former GRU Colonel Stanislav Lunev, "SVR and GRU (Russia's political and military intelligence agencies, respectively) are operating against the U.S. in a much more active manner than they were during even the hottest days of the Cold War." From the end of the 1980s, KGB and later SVR began to create "a second echelon" of "auxiliary agents in addition to our main weapons, illegals and special agents", according to former SVR officer Kouzminov. These agents are legal immigrants, including scientists and other professionals. Another SVR officer who defected to Britain in 1996 described details about thousand Russian agents and intelligence officers, some of them "illegals" who live under deep cover abroad. Recently caught Russian high-profile agents in US are Aldrich Hazen Ames, Harold James Nicholson, Earl Edwin Pitts, Robert Philip Hanssen and George Trofimoff.