Summary
1 November 2011
The FBI has released images of a group of Russian spies who were expelled from the United States last year.
The group included Anna Chapman who is now a model and television presenter in Russia.
Reporter:
Steve Kingstone
Anna Chapman has been the centre of media attention
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Report
Much of the material released by the FBI follows the classic Hollywood formula for espionage.
We see agents exchanging identical bags as they brush past each other, while another undercover spy retrieves a package hidden in the Washington undergrowth.
The glamorous Anna Chapman is filmed shopping in a department store, and having coffee with a man who she believed to be a Russian handler but who in fact was an FBI infiltrator. That was the moment Ms Chapman suspected her cover as an estate agent in New York was blown.
Soon afterwards, the FBI broke up the spy ring. Ten defendants pleaded guilty to acting as foreign agents, before being exchanged last July for four Russians who'd been jailed in their own country for spying for the West.
Members of the US-based group had gathered public information and networked on behalf of Moscow, while leading suburban middle-class lives often assuming the identities of Americans who had recently died.
The FBI case file offers an intriguing glimpse of 21st Century espionage. But it remains to be seen whether the images prove as popular as others of Anna Chapman. Now a successful television presenter, the former spy has appeared with very little cover in men's magazines.
Steve Kingstone, 大象传媒 News, Washington
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Vocabulary
- espionage
spying; the work of trying to learn the secrets of one country to pass on to another
- brush past
walk in opposite directions towards each other and just touch as they pass
- undergrowth
bushes, plants and weeds growing under the trees of a wooded area
- handler
someone who acts as a contact for a spy
- infiltrator
a person who secretly becomes part of a group in order to get information about that group
- cover
everyday job used to hide the work of a spy
- blown
discovered and revealed
- broke up
arrested the members of
- assuming the identities of
using the names and documents of other people
- an intriguing glimpse of
a fascinating view of
