10 alleged Russian secret agents arrested by the FBI yesterday, are reported to have used a 'Malta' password to identify each other.
The secret agents were arrested for allegedly serving for years as agents of Russia's intelligence service, the SVR, with the goal of penetrating US government policymaking circles.
The Washington Post said SVR headquarters, Moscow Centre’s instructions were explicit: For a meeting in Rome, its American spy would approach a stranger and ask, "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?"
"Yes indeed,” the answer should be. “I was in La Valetta, but in 2000.”
According to Moscow’s instructions, the stranger would then slip the spy a false Irish passport, for travel on to Russia.
The meeting is described in an FBI court papers filed yesterday in support of the FBI's arrest of the 10 alleged “deep cover” Russian spies
According to the court papers, the FBI intercepted a message from Moscow Centre to two of the defendants describing their main mission as "to search and develop ties in policymaking circles in US".
Intercepted messages showed they were asked to learn about a broad sweep of topics including nuclear weapons, US arms control positions, Iran, White House rumours, CIA leadership turnover, the last presidential election, the Congress and political parties.
After a secret multiyear investigation, the Justice Department announced the arrests in a blockbuster spy case that could rival the capture of Soviet Colonel Rudolf Abel in 1957 in New York.
There was no clue in initial court papers how successful the agents had been, but they were alleged to have been long-term, deep cover spies, some living as couples.
These deep-cover agents are the hardest spies for the FBI to catch because they take civilian jobs with no visible connection to a foreign government - one was a reporter, editor and columnist at a New York Spanish-language newspaper.
They are more elusive than spies who operate from government jobs inside Russian embassies and military missions.
Col Abel was just such a deep cover agent; he was ultimately swapped to the Soviet Union for downed U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962.
The court papers described a new high-tech spy-to-spy communications system used by the defendants: short-range wireless communications between laptop computers - a modern supplement for the old-style dead drop in a remote area, high-speed burst radio transmission or even the hollowed-out nickels used by Col Abel to conceal and deliver microfilm.
But there was no lack of Cold War spycraft. According to the court papers, the alleged agents used invisible ink, stayed in touch with Moscow Centre through coded bursts of data sent by a radio transmitter, used innocent-looking "brush" encounters to pass messages in public, hid encrypted data in public images and relied on fake identities and false travel documents.
On Saturday, an undercover FBI agent in New York and another in Washington, both posing as Russian agents, met with two of the defendants, Anna Chapman at a New York restaurant and Mikhail Semenko on a Washington street corner blocks from the White House.
The FBI undercover agents gave each an espionage-related delivery to make. Court papers indicated Semenko made the delivery as instructed, but apparently Chapman did not.
Eight of the 10 were arrested for allegedly carrying out long-term, deep-cover assignments in the United States on behalf of Russia.
Two others, who were the targets of the undercover approaches, were arrested and charged separately for allegedly participating in the same Russian intelligence programme within the United States. An 11th defendant, who allegedly delivered money to the defendants, is at large.
The court papers cited numerous communications intercepted in the FBI probe that spelled out what the 10 allegedly were trying to do.
The timing of the arrests was notable given the efforts by Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev to "reset" US-Russia relations.
The two leaders met just last week at the White House after Mr Medvedev visited high-tech firms in California's Silicon Valley, and both attended the G8, G20 meetings over the weekend in Canada.
Intelligence on Mr Obama's foreign policy positions, particularly toward Russia, appears to have been a top priority for the alleged spies.
In the spring of 2009, the documents say, alleged conspirators Richard and Cynthia Murphy, who lived in New Jersey, were asked by Moscow for information related to Mr Obama's impending trip to Russia that summer.
See also
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/06/russian_spy_case_shows_things.html