The Spies Among Us: Who's Next?

"They couldn't have been spies. Look what she did with the hydrangeas."

Such was a quote from a neighbor of Cynthia Murphy (right), one of the 10 people arrested recently on charges of spying for Russia. With varying degrees, each of these people had lived in the U.S. for a number of years, established a number of networks as if they were "normal" people, and given themselves enough of a public profile that they were, in effect, hiding in plain sight.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has released information claiming observations of those people, some during a number of years, engaged in all manner of espionage-like activities, including dead drops, swapping of bags containing sensitive material, and even exchanging coded electronic messages from stable laptops to moving vehicles via wireless networks.

What are we to make of this? Is this just Desperate Housewives run amok? Surely this sort of thing doesn't go on anymore. The Cold War is over. The Berlin Wall has come down. The Soviet Union is no more.

And yet spying exists in the world. Countries and their governments strive for dominance and hegemony and bragging rights and oil and gas rights and food supplies and all manner of other things on the world stage — always looking to get ahead, gain an edge, pull a fast one, embarrass enemies, strike first and (maybe) ask questions later.

This latest episode, a mixture of antiquated methods and up-to-the-minute technology, is nothing more than the latest chapter in an ongoing struggle between West and East — old enemies fighting in a new way.

Secrets are big business. People pay a lot of money, even kill, to obtain and/or protect them. A secret can be worth a thousand words or just a few letters or words of code that, put in the correct sequence or to the correct person, can make all the difference in the world between the access codes of a country's missile defense system and the menu at a Chinese restaurant.

It should be no surprise that Russia, tiring of hearing that the U.S. was the only remaining superpower, wanted a piece of all that, whatever all that was — economic, trade, military secrets. The nature of espionage is such that, when discovered, secrets never quite lend themselves to totally being unraveled, existing in murky shadows of cloak and dagger and mistrust as they do.

Then there are the hydrangeas. One of the alleged spies had quite a green thumb — which, of course, made a great cover for what she was really doing — namely, releasing secret information about her new homeland to her original homeland. She was not alone: many of the people arrested lived quiet or sometimes rather loud lives, in the public eye or at least in semi-public circles. These people made friends, bonds, and families and appeared for all the world like normal Americans, living in normal American homes. But they obviously were not normal Americans, despite the apparent normality of the homes in which they lived and the circles in which they traveled. (And by normal here is meant not spying for another country).

That these people were able to get away with such audacious activities for so long calls into question (or, at least, it should) the actions, intentions, and future plans of many others that we all know, know of, or perhaps want to know. The question should be asked, of course: How well do you know that family member, friend, or acquaintance? It's probably not time to get back into the boom shelter or have a spy flick night filled with The Manchurian Candidate, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, and any number of James Bond flicks. However, it's probably a good idea as well to pay more attention to what's going in the immediate vicinity and how well we conceal our own personal information, especially in this day and age of open-source, open-book social media networks run rampant.

If your neighbor walks around with stained thumbs a lot, it's probably a good idea to make sure that the stains come from garden soil, not photocopied documents.