I read about this from several news sources but our local paper had this one snippet that caught my attention. Here's the full link:
Nation & World | Former Seattle couple among 11 accused of being Russian spies | Seattle Times Newspaper
Criminal complaints filed in U.S. District Court read like an old-fashioned Cold War thriller: Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past one another in a train-station stairwell; an identity borrowed from a dead Canadian; forged passports of several countries; letters sent by shortwave-burst transmission or in invisible ink; a money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York.
But the network of so-called illegals — spies operating under false names outside the usual diplomatic cover — also used cyber-age technology, according to the charges. They embedded coded texts in ordinary-looking images posted on the Internet and communicated by having two agents with laptops containing special software pass casually as messages flashed between them.
Two of the defendants were identified as Michael Zottoli and his wife, Patricia Mills. They lived in Seattle until last year, when they moved to Arlington, Va., according to charging documents.
One Seattle apartment where the couple lived was the target of a judicially approved, clandestine search by the FBI on Feb. 17, 2006, the charging papers say. Agents reported finding a short-wave radio and notebooks filled with numbers, which they suspect might have been used to receive and decipher coded messages.
Nation & World | Former Seattle couple among 11 accused of being Russian spies | Seattle Times Newspaper
Criminal complaints filed in U.S. District Court read like an old-fashioned Cold War thriller: Spies swapping identical orange bags as they brushed past one another in a train-station stairwell; an identity borrowed from a dead Canadian; forged passports of several countries; letters sent by shortwave-burst transmission or in invisible ink; a money cache buried for years in a field in upstate New York.
But the network of so-called illegals — spies operating under false names outside the usual diplomatic cover — also used cyber-age technology, according to the charges. They embedded coded texts in ordinary-looking images posted on the Internet and communicated by having two agents with laptops containing special software pass casually as messages flashed between them.
Two of the defendants were identified as Michael Zottoli and his wife, Patricia Mills. They lived in Seattle until last year, when they moved to Arlington, Va., according to charging documents.
One Seattle apartment where the couple lived was the target of a judicially approved, clandestine search by the FBI on Feb. 17, 2006, the charging papers say. Agents reported finding a short-wave radio and notebooks filled with numbers, which they suspect might have been used to receive and decipher coded messages.
