Alleged Russian Spies Say American Girls Are Too Damn Much Work
LatestMy fellow Americans: Apparently Russian spies think American college girls are just too damn difficult to work with, which is something they would have known in advance if they’d ever tried to plan a spring break trip to Cabo sophomore year with their besties.
Foreign Policy reports that, earlier this week, the FBI accused a trio of Russians living in New York—Evgeny Buryakov, Victor Podobnyy and Igor Sporyshev—of espionage on behalf of Russia. They say that Podobnyy and Sporyshev ran the op, but only Buryakov has actually been arrested—the others skipped town and were probably protected by diplomatic immunity, anyway. (Guess a spy boss will throw you under the bus faster than a particularly vicious sixth-grade frenemy.)
ABC reports that, among their other schemes, Podobnyy and Sporyshev wanted to recruit “several young women with ties to a major university located in New York” to do their bidding. But they hit a brick wall, in that American girls weren’t interested in their overtures:
“I have lots of ideas about such girls, but these ideas are not actionable because they don’t allow [you] to get close enough,” Sporyshev says in another April 2013 recording. “And in order to be close, you either need to f*** them or use other levers to influence them to execute my requests. So when you tell me about girls, in my experience, it’s very rare that something workable will come of it.”
The FBI later interviewed two women who had been approached by Podobny and they separately told the federal agents he tried to “ingratiate himself and gain information from each of them,” the complaint says.
Wow, imagine—college girls might be skeptical of randos who ask a lot of probing questions. It’s almost like a major component of undergraduate education is four years of warding off creeps!
Nor was that their only disappointment. Recorded conversations released by the FBI suggest the spies hoped their work would be a little more dashing: “[Unintelligible] movies about James Bond. Of course, I wouldn’t fly helicopters, but pretend to be someone else at a minimum.” “I also thought I would at least go abroad with a different passport,” his compatriot responded.
So much for Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Sketchy RA.
Image via AP.