Russian espionage still remains a serious business, decades after the Cold War.
Just five days after US President Barack Obama met his Russian counterpart Dimitri Medvedev in an attempt to improve relations between the two governments, the US state department has arrested 10 individuals in New York state, all suspected of infiltrating US policy-making bodies on behalf of the Kremlin.
An 11th suspect fled to Europe and absconded in Cyprus.
In a plot that reads like a John LeCarre novel, the group were allegedly all working in 'deep cover' carrying out a long term conspiracy plan that stretched back to the 1990s. Not a spy ring in the conventional sense, eight of them are husband-and-wife teams who allegedly were sent by the The FSK (the successor organization to the KGB) to the US to live as Americans and slowly gain positions of trust and access to information.
Michael Farbiarz, the assistant US attorney announced that he had almost a decade's worth of video and audio surveillance records of meetings between Russian government officials and some of the alleged conspirators.
Communicating via WiFi and traditional radio frequency transmitters they have been sending and receiving encrytped communications for years. The alleged spies are also said to have communicated with their handlers by encoding encrypted data into images which were then posted onto public websites.
Although the press have had a field day with this story (notably labelling one of the accused as being a classic 'flame-haired femme fatale'), both Washington and Moscow have sought to downplay the incident, not wanting to start a round of tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats.
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