News Flash: Russian spying on the United States since 1850s

Russian spying: Should I dare bring up the Soviet spies that infiltrated the Democrat Administration of Franklin Roosevelt?

This may come as somewhat of a shock to the Democrats, but Russia has been spying on our beloved America since at least the middle of the 19th century. Way before Boris Badenov tried to rig the outcome of the football game between Wossamatta U. and the Mud City Manglers, the Russians have been knee-deep in America’s affairs of state.

In spite of the Democrats recent clutching of pearls and near apoplectic drama when the cameras are on, those nogoodniks in Mother Russia have been snoopin’ and poopin’ on us since at least 1851.

As noted in the book The Treaty of Portsmouth and Its Legacies, edited by Steven Ericson and Allen Hockley, the American ambassador to Czarist Russia, Neil S. Brown from 1851-1853, reported back to Washington that the “most disagreeable features of Russia were its secrecy, surveillance, distrust, undue ceremony and delay, overbearing police, censorship, and espionage, including opening communications and spying.” Sounds like the Obama Administration.

It’s a fair bet that the same espionage and spying Ambassador Brown decried was also pointed directly at the American embassy in the then Russian capital of St. Petersburg.

By the way, the definition of espionage is “the practice

of spying or using spies to obtain information about the plans and activities especially of a foreign government”.

Speaking of fair bets, our own CIA notes in their official website that a little sumpin’-sumpin’ called the Zagranichnaia okhranka (fancy Russian talk for the House of Romanov’s Imperial Police) opened their Paris office in 1883 to keep an eye on Russian troublemakers who’ve been booted from the Land of the Rus.

And yes, it’s a fair bet that the butt-in-skis at the unpronounceable Zagranichnaia okhranka poked their collective noses into the goings-on at the American embassy regarding the status of Russians who had recently emigrated to the States.

But if Czarist Russia isn’t your cup of tea, there’s always the re-branded Russians, also known as the Soviets.

In the Edward Mickolus book The Counterintelligence Chronology: Spying by and Against the United States from the 1700s through 2014, the author notes that the former-USSR posted their first (that we know of) intelligence officer in the United States.

As it turns out, standard spy-craft wasn’t enough for the Soviets. Even the dependably left-leaning PBS cited on their website;

The Amtorg Trading Corporation is an American company based in New York that was founded in 1924 by the Soviet Union to serve as its buying and selling organization in trade between the USSR and the USA. It handled the bulk of Soviet-American trade until 1935, and continues to exist today. Working as an Amtorg employee served as a convenient cover for Soviet spies, such as Morris Cohen.

That’s right. The same Morris Cohen who turned his back on the land of his birth, and later against Great Britain, for the Soviet Union.

They’re called the RED Sox for a reason