I'm understanding less and less of this Russian Spy business. Granted, I haven't read much more than the first couple paragraphs of a half dozen stories over the last couple weeks, but still I would think it would make more sense.

1. What information were they trying to get? They seem like pretty harmless spies to me.
2. Why would the US Administration start negotiations with the Russians on a swap a month before they had the spies in custody?
3. Why would the Russians participate in those negotiations if the US had nobody to trade at that time?
4. Why are we being told about this now? Who in the administration "leaked" it (with permission, I'm sure), and why? Who does the leak benefit? Presumably Obama, but I don't really see how.
5. Is this all just an administration attempt at driving the news cycle away from the BP mess? [/conspiracy theorist]

The information they got may have been incidental. I heard (on NPR?) that some of them may have helped with dead drops, etc, for actual spies.

Propaganda. Its all a set up. Nothing else makes sense.

Why would we have been watching them for YEARS and not pick them up?
There are way too many holes in this story.
There must be a lot of information missing.




:tinfoil: I wonder if one of them had a copy of Obama's Birth Certificate :tinfoil:

Is that a serious question, or part of the :tinfoil:?

Because they didn't catch them doing anything more than minor violations but were watching for some serious spying to happen.

A little of both, I guess.

What Bruce said, for one.

During WWII, the Allies allowed attacks to succeed, just to keep secret the fact that we'd broken the encryption that forwarned us of them. Compared to that, this is a no-brainer; they weren't doing any damage. In fact, by operating under our scrutiny, they could potentially be of much more service to us than to Russia.

I mentioned to my brother that I thought this may have been initiated by leftover KGB bosses that really didn't know what to do after the cold war fizzled out. He countered with, it can take 10 or 15 years to set up a good spy ring, and in this world of shifting power/alliances, may be they were just-in-case agents.

The FBI were probably just laughing at them the entire time. Kind of like the little kid/cat/drunk friend that tries to be very sneaky and discrete but you know exactly what they are trying to do.

..........or perhaps FBI is just making it up that they knew about the spies the entire time. Maybe the ring was busted only now and FBI want to save their assess about being an ass from last decade or so.

No, the FBI knew about them from money movement, which they have been watching closely since 9-11.