Spy Swap!

By James 

Recently, the United States arrested 10 people pretending to be spies so they could escape Russia and own a home of their own, and also dig up bags of free money from a field in upstate New York. And also write in invisible marker, which I always unsuccessfully tried to find a secret use for when I was a kid. (At least we landed on the moon before them.)

Everyone is talking about the impending spy swap between the cold war loser Russia and the cold war winner the United States of America. Even the Russians are taking time out of being upset about being conquered by the Mongols to read about this, so it is every American’s duty to read more about it than them, before there is a “knowledge of spy story” gap.

In this Spy vs. Spy comic-esque drama, the U.S. dropped a bomb containing 10 recently arrested spies on Russia’s head, killing it, until the next issue. The 10 Russian spies will be exchanged for 9 of our spies, which is the going exchange rate for a spy swap. One of our spies is named Igor, or some other equally grotesque name, according to his mother, who is named as a source for some of this information by a journalist.

Do you know that the Russians initially denied this and then agreed to this spy swap? This isn’t some bullshit you can find on Craigslist. This is a spy swap, jerks. Just to clear things up, Barack and Leon did not post a Craigslist ad asking if anyone wants to swap 9 U.S. spies for 10 “like-new” Russian spies. They just said to Russia, “we have some of your fucking spies, dudes, and we want to do a spy swap.” However, I once read a “missed connections” I thought may’ve been posted by Leon Panetta: “i saw u sell plans for a nuclear bomb to iran and n korea… u looked sexy and had the sexiest russ accent like out of a james bond movie. did u notice me? respond with ‘sexy russ spy’ in the headline, otherwise it will delete it like spam.” I digress…

During the cold war, spying was all the rage. The Russia and the U.S. each tried to keep at least a literal stable full of spies in the other’s nation to do all kinds of crazy espionage, such as steal state secrets, like, “Kruschev is such a hotty.” It used to be pretty crazy, some people called the Rosenbergs were executed for alleged spying. However, this one is really not so bad. According to this guy quoted in a LA Times article, “’However this time it will have a somewhat farcical connotation," Kortunov said. "The alleged spies arrested in the United States didn't really achieve anything in terms of espionage, while Sutyagin, many human rights activists believe, was not a spy either, and his conviction was purely political.’" Whenever anyone calls anything farcical, I am always on-board. And yes, I did just quote an article quoting someone else—we live in a post-modern world where journalism like this is standard.

It seems to me, though, that both the U.S. and the Russia are trying to hush up all the excitement, so it won’t strain recently improved U.S.-Russian relations (Obama “liked” a picture of Medvedev giving a thumbs-up on Facebook), when it should drag on as long as possible. Don’t we live in America?

So, perhaps nothing really happened, but it’s still pretty cool. Someone should probably write a memoir or Tom Clancy novel about this after all the bad press blows over.