Essay: Spy arrests offer bit of Cold War nostalgia

Associated Press

WASHINGTON

The capture of those alleged deep-cover Russian agents has — for a moment of nostalgia — taken Americans back to a day when their enemy was sneaky but familiar, ensconced right there behind the crenelated red-brick Kremlin walls.

Through the Cold War, the U.S. had adapted psychologically to those bad guys: misguided anti-capitalist Europeans who, nevertheless, sat in the United Nations, had diplomats in world capitals and even agreed now and again to cold-eyed summit meetings.

That enemy could not and did not flourish in the vastness of alien deserts or impenetrable hideaways in some of the world’s most rugged and distant mountains.

The Soviets never sent suicide pilots to fly planes into landmark American skyscrapers.

Members of their dour Politburo weren’t out to kill religious infidels. They believed in no god, their only religion the tangled theories of Marx and Lenin.

Thus, it was a balm of sorts in the week leading to U.S. Independence Day, the high holiday of American patriotism, to return to a time when government agents could roll up a band of alleged Russian spies — deep-cover, sleeper agents who looked just like our neighbors, seemingly consumed with their inconspicuous suburban lives.

Bookstore shelves weighed down with yarns about the Cold War spy vs. spy contest bear witness to our fascination with that high-stakes game, how it was played and what led the players to take the chances they did.

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