The reason for the puzzling behavior, according to a federal complaint unsealed Monday, is that the men were Russian spies exchanging intelligence information in New York City.
They used tickets and other everyday objects — like books, umbrellas and hats — as part of their code. When they did meet, on dozens of occasions between early 2012 and late 2014, it was usually outdoors in order to lower the risk of surveillance.
At the short meetings, one man would hand a bag, a magazine or a slip of paper to another.
Alleged covert agent
But the FBI was watching and listening to them. On Monday in New York, authorities arrested one of the men, who they say had been working as a covert agent for the Russian government.
He was identified as Evgeny Buryakov, 39, who posed as an employee in the New York City office of a Russian bank, according to the federal complaint.
The man he met regularly for the handoffs was Igor Sporyshev, 40, who worked as a trade representative for the Russian government in New York, the complaint says.
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Prosecutors announced charges Monday against Buryakov, Sporyshev and Podobnyy on two counts. The first is participating in a conspiracy for Buryakov to act in the United States as an agency of a foreign government without first notifying the Attorney General, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
In the second count, Buryakov is charged with acting in the United States as an agent of a foreign government without first notifying the Attorney General, while Sporyshev and Podobnyy are charged with aiding and abetting that offense. The maximum sentence for that count is 10 years imprisonment.
The charges and Buryakov’s arrest “make clear that—more than two decades after the presumptive end of the Cold War—Russian spies continue to seek to operate in our midst under cover of secrecy,” said U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
A federal judge in Manhattan on Monday ordered that Buryakov be detained because he was considered to pose a flight risk, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
His federal public defender, Sabrina Shroff, spoke to The New York Times. She declined to comment on the charges other than to say that she had argued for bail because Buryakov was neither a flight risk nor a danger to the community, the newspaper reported.
CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz contributed to this report.
