[Irish_Army01]

I wish foreign Governments would leave the fuck our passports alone..

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/...reaking22.html

The Government is checking reports that a forged Irish passport may have been used by a member of an alleged Russian spy ring arrested in the US.

The FBI arrested 10 people at the weekend accused of carrying out deep-cover work in the United States to recruit political sources and gather information for the Russian government.

The Department of Foreign Affairs confirmed to The Irish Times this morning that a person arrested in the US on suspicion of espionage activities is alleged to have travelled on a forged Irish passport.

The Department said it would be seeking to obtain further information in relation to these reports.

A statement issued by the Department said "the firm position of the Government in regard to the fraudulent use of Irish passports is a matter of public record".

Earlier this month, the Government expelled an official at the Israeli embassy in Dublin in protest over the use of forged Irish passports by suspects in the killing of a Hamas official in Dubai.

The suspects were arrested on Sunday in Boston, New York, New Jersey and Virginia on charges including conspiracy to act as unlawful agents of the Russian Federation and money laundering.

The FBI has arrested 10 people who allegedly spied for Russia for up to a decade - posing as innocent civilians while trying to infiltrate US policymaking circles and learn about weapons, diplomatic strategy and political developments.

An 11th defendant - a man accused of delivering money to the agents - remains at large.

It is not known how successful the agents had been, but they were alleged to have been long-term, deep cover spies. Among them were four couples living in suburbs of New York, Washington and Boston. One woman was a reporter and editor for a prominent Spanish-language newspaper in New York whom the FBI says it videotaped contacting a Russian official in 2000 in Latin America.

These deep-cover agents are the hardest spies for the FBI to catch and are dubbed "illegals" in the intelligence world because they take civilian jobs with no visible connection to a foreign government, rather than operating from government jobs inside Russian embassies and military missions. In this case, they were spread out and seeking a wide swath of information.

The FBI said it intercepted a message from Moscow Center, headquarters of Russia's intelligence service, the SVR, 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 wide range of topics, including nuclear weapons, US arms control positions, Iran, White House rumors, CIA leadership turnover, the last presidential election, Congress and the political parties.

The arrests of alleged deep cover agents following a severa- year-long FBI investigation could rival the bureau's famous capture of Soviet Col. Rudolf Abel in 1957 in New York.

Also a deep cover agent, Abel was ultimately swapped to the Soviet Union for downed U-2 spy pilot Francis Gary Powers in 1962.

The court papers also described a new high-tech spy-to-spy communications system allegedly 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 the hollowed-out nickels used by 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 Center 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.

The court papers cited numerous communications intercepted by the FBI that spelled out what information was sought.

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 last week at the White House after Mr Medvedev visited high-tech firms in California's Silicon Valley, and both attended the G-8, G-20 meetings over the weekend in Canada