I present to you my neighbors.
Upstairs, the typical English blonde, frankly unbearable, professional mediator, although she is the most uncompromising person I know; below, a British couple of Indian origin, she a recruiter, more British than Queen Elizabeth, and he, an amateur musician, and in the attic, a financial speculator with one foot in Singapore and one in Marbella . All lined What is this introduction due to?, you may ask. It's that for the first time I wonder if one of them will be a Russian spy. Apparently, London is full of them.
Three Bulgarian citizens accused this week of espionage and put on trial were neighbors of someone and had apparently the most normal lives, the couple in the middle-class neighborhoods of the north of the capital, and the other in a village of the Norfolk coast. They could be the protagonists of a television series like The Americans, in which a couple with two children, typical of the suburbs of any city in the United States, as Yankee as Chevrolets and peanut butter, have actually been “cultivated” from young people as agents and infiltrators for the KGB. Nothing James Bond. Their link is a midwife who could be the supermarket cashier in the mall.
The Bulgarians in question had been here for many years, but they weren't pretending to be English (their accent would have prevented them). Over time they have had multiple jobs, and currently Katrin Ivanova (31) worked as an assistant in a private medical laboratory, Bizer Dzhambazov (41) transported blood for a hospital and Orlin Roussev (45) said on his resume that he had done technical work in the financial industry, advised his country's Ministry of Energy and owned an electronic signal interception business. The latter sounds suspicious in itself, but he must not have given much money, because he lived in a discreet boarding house.
Life in the suburbs seems boring, but it gives a lot of fun. Katrin and Bizer (you'll forgive my confidence) collected passports as if they were football player cards and the police discovered a total of nineteen identity documents in their house, including Spanish, British, French, Italian, Croatian, Slovenian, Greek, from the Czech Republic and Bulgarian, just to name a few. They were in close contact with the community of their country, they offered the new arrivals almost free English courses and lessons in acclimatization to the life of these islands and their social customs and helped them to do the necessary procedures to be able to vote from from abroad They claim they were doing it altruistically, but the intelligence service's speculation is that their mission, on orders from Moscow, was to influence the outcome of the election and to support the far-right pro-Russian Bulgaria
The trio was actually arrested in February, but it's only now that the public has been informed and charges have been filed. Aside from the jobs they had at any given time, in addition to passports they collected press passes from mainly American media, such as National Geographic and the Discovery television channel, and posed as journalists to obtain information. All in all, it looks like a pretty do-it-yourself operation, because there have to be more glamorous and more effective ways of spying than pretending to be a reporter. But the counter-intelligence unit of the Metropolitan Police has taken their activities very seriously, and has summoned them to the Old Bailey (Criminal Court) next year with charges yet to be decided, but that they will certainly include "making use of false documents for criminal purposes".
A recent British Government report warns, after a six-month investigation, that London is full of Russian spies and that Vladimir Putin, as a former KGB official, is doing everything possible to infiltrate banks, financial services , security companies, Parliament, the Ministry of Defense and the intelligence apparatus. This, apart from those who have come as tourists to poison double agents Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei Skrypal. In 2018, former Prime Minister Theresa May expelled twenty-three diplomats from the Russian Federation.
The Bulgarians gave their neighbors cakes and bottles of wine... None of my people ever offered me anything. Will someone be a Russian spy? It doesn't seem likely, but who knows...
