How Russia, US still spy on each other

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MOSCOW – The Cold War is long over, but espionage is forever. Russian spies still operate in the US and American ones in Russia. On Tuesday, Russia’s security services said they had caught a US diplomat whom they claim is a CIA official trying to recruit a Russian agent.

Here’s some other cases of apparent spying between the old rivals:

The Anna Chapman ring

These Russian spies lived in suburban US homes and worked at jobs like real estate brokers or travel agents, quietly inserting themselves into American life and trying to penetrate US policy circles. Court papers said Chapman and nine others assumed the identities of people who had died, swapped bags in passing at train stations and communicated with invisible ink and coded radio transmissions. After their 2010 arrests, all 10 pleaded guilty to spying charges. An 11th man was arrested in Cyprus but jumped bail.

Dubbed a femme fatale, the red-headed Chapman, 28 at the time, became the most notorious member of the ring, partially because of glamorous photos she posted on social networking sites of her international travels. She has stayed in the limelight since her deportation to Russia, hosting a reality TV show, modeling lingerie and becoming the face of a Moscow bank.

Sergei Tretyakov

Tretyakov once called the United Nations a nest of spies. And he would know. For five years in the 1990s, Tretyakov worked at Russia’s diplomatic mission at the UN – recruiting and running spies. He also found Canada to be fertile ground for finding people willing to rat on the US.

Tretyakov claimed his agents helped Russia siphon nearly $500 million from the UN oil-for-food sanctions program for Iraq. Then in 2000, he defected to the US It’s thought that Tretyakov handed significant information over to Washington, although he never specifically confirmed that he became a double agent. He died in Florida in 2010 at age 53 of a heart attack.

Stanislav Borisovich Gusev

Gusev, a Russian diplomat, planted a bug inside the State Department in Washington, DC, and then hung around on a bench outside the building or in his car to listen, according to US authorities. Agents became suspicious when they spotted him feeding a parking meter outside State Department headquarters without ever going inside. He was arrested in 1999 and expelled from the US.

Aldrich Ames

As a CIA officer in Turkey, Ames worked to turn Russians against their government. But in 1985, he switched sides himself, offering his services to the Soviets. He continued working for the Russians after the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. He communicated with his handlers by leaving chalk marks on a Washington, DC, mailbox. He eventually passed along to Moscow dozens of names of Russians who were spying for the US The Soviet Union executed 10 of them. The FBI arrested Ames in 1994 and he pleaded guilty to spying that same year.