FBI fooled bumbling Russian spies

The third agent, Evgeny Buryakov, in court. Picture / AP

Moscow Centre agents recorded lamenting their lack of a 007 lifestyle and inability to recruit female students

Another tale of Russian spooks operating in the US has emerged, described by the former CIA analyst Mark Stout as a "classic case of espionage".

This time New York was its setting. A pair of agents were, it is claimed in a criminal complaint written by the FBI, running a third undercover agent for Moscow Centre. The extent of the Russian bumbling is something to behold.

Igor Sporyshev and Viktor Podobnyy were, until recently, a Russian trade representative and an attache to Russia's mission to the UN in New York respectively. Both were charged with conspiracy under America's espionage laws. So too was the man they are accused as running on behalf of their real bosses at the SVR, Russia's intelligence service, Evgeny "Zhenya" Buryakov. His real job was at a Russian bank in Manhattan, named as state-run Vnesheconombank.

The two handlers appear to have approached their job with remarkable incompetence.

Both recently returned to Russia and are thus beyond the reach of the US Justice Department. They are not beyond the SVR, however, and Siberia might be in their futures.

First, they underestimated the counterespionage skills of the FBI. Their conversations inside an SVR office in Manhattan were recorded, their phone conversations were bugged and physical meetings with Buryakov were video-recorded.

Prosecutors say they violated any privileges of diplomatic immunity by conspiring with Buryakov, who had no diplomatic status as a bank employee in New York; they conveyed the fruits of his espionage, which was mostly economic in nature, to Moscow Centre; and they also sought to recruit other individuals in New York to spy for their country. Finding willing recruits was a challenge for them. Their targets included female students at New York University. "I have lots of ideas about such girls but these ideas are not actionable because they don't allow to get close enough," Sporyshev is heard lamenting. Podobnyy is heard to wonder why their lives aren't more like James Bond's. "I wouldn't fly helicopters, but pretend to be someone else at a minimum." According to the complaint, Buryakov wormed his way into conversations about an impending multibillion-dollar deal between Russia and an unidentified aircraft manufacturer outside the US and offered a strategy for Moscow to overcome objections to it by unions in that country.

On one occasion, it claimed that he also supplied his masters with questions that a Russian news organisation should be asking in an interview about the New York Stock Exchange designed to elicit useful information for the SVR.

But that was when the men really blundered. Instead of following their usual protocol of only exchanging information in face-to-face meetings in public places in the city, on this occasion they were in a hurry and allegedly told Buryakov to supply his thoughts on the NYSE interview within 15 minutes on the telephone - the FBI-bugged telephone.

What really sank them was when Buryakov took the bait from an FBI agent posing as a representative of an investor curious about building casinos in Russia.

The agent offered to hand over US Treasury documents about impending US sanctions on Russia. Too good to be true, and indeed Sporyshev, according to the complaint, mused aloud that it looked like "some sort of a set-up. Trap of some sort." But instead of shutting Buryakov down, he gave him rope. "You will look and decide for yourself," he told him.

Taking the Treasury documents is surely Buryakov's biggest regret as he sits in a New York jail now wondering what happens next.