Russian Spies in Our Midst

With accusations of Russian meddling in the U.S. presidential election and the F.B.I. investigating whether members of President Trump’s campaignwere involved, Washington seems to be getting all the espionage attention.

Yet we’d like to point out that New York’s streets, parks and libraries have long been grounds for covert operations.

“New York is one of the great espionage capitals of the world,” said Edward Lucas, the author of “Deception: The Untold Story of East-West Espionage Today.” “But the spying that happens in New York doesn’t always involve United States.”

A big draw for foreign agents is the United Nations, Mr. Lucas said. For spies, “it’s like a pond: Any fish you want swims through there.”

New York has long been a hub of Russian spies because the Russian Mission to the U.N. was a way of getting agents into the United States, where they could work covertly and recruit Americans to their cause, Mr. Lucas added.

A few of our city’s most famous Soviet spies include:

• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Manhattan couple accused of perpetuating the “crime of the century” from their Lower East Side apartment. They were convicted of an espionage conspiracy for stealing atom bomb secrets for the Soviets, and were executed by electric chair in 1953. (Mrs. Rosenberg’s defenders, among them her two sons, say she was innocent and should be exonerated.)

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