Russian Spies in the Banking Sector

We never seem to get the whole story in a summary of a case that is released to the public, but this one is a little different.  Justice has a press release [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/russian-national-pleads-guilty-connection-conspiracy-work-russian-intelligence]  on one Zhenya Buryakov that is very interesting.

"Evgeny Buryakov, aka Zhenya, 41, pleaded guilty today to conspiring to act in the United States as an agent of the Russian Federation without providing prior notice to the Attorney General."

We might miss that without looking closely, since pleading guilty to being an unregistered agent doesn't even sound like spying.  I went back to the original indictment at [ https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/01/26/buryakov_et_al_complaint.pdf ] and some stories by the Times and Guardian that are a little better at explaining what this is all about.  Buryakov was a spy working for Russia's SVR, in particular a unit called Directorate ER, which is collecting on economic issue.  In this case that meant focusing on alternative energy sources.

Buryakov was finding other people to help him spy, including some who were being recorded by the FBI as a part of their investigation.  His cover was the New York Trade Mission of the Russian Federation in the United States.  He recruited people, took collection tasking from the SVR, and sent back a regular stream of intelligence reports to Moscow from "a secure office in Manhattan used by SVR agents to send and receive intelligence reports and assignments from Moscow Center...."

Somebody has to write a book about this because it sounds so much like a Cold War spy drama jazzed up to a modern economic war scenario.  This Cold War has been going on for some time and most of our citizens have missed it.  The Russians and Chinese are both stealing from us and using that information to better their own economies.   We allow a number of foreign banks to operate in the U.S. and this provides ample opportunity for other spies to do the same type of thing.  China has four of the top ten banks in the world and the Federal Reserve is allowing some of them to buy U.S. bank branches [see http://www.americanbanker.com/bankthink/little-to-fear-much-to-gain-from-chinese-banks-1050841-1.html  ] .  That is what we call fair trade.