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I spy with my little eye... well anything I want if I’m a Russian
Why...
Do we all act surprised and indignant that our Russian friends have been peeking into our electronic in-tray. It was ever thus. Ever since Neolithic man discovered he could use an empty coconut shell as an eavesdropping devise and hear his neighbors in the next cave having sex with a Mammoth, we have all been snooping on one another. Let’s face it. Most of what those Russkies tap into is either boring or irrelevant. And if they could actually influence an American election with a couple of tweets as opposed to the $1 billion Hillary and Donald used to batter the electorate into submission, campaign managers and spin doctors should all be made redundant. For the West it’s perfectly OK for 007 to surreptitiously bump off a double agent or photograph the head of the secret police in bed with a nun to blackmail him, but it’s completely outrageous if Putin’s Dzhemys Bondski gets one over on us. If there is one heartening thing to come out of all this, is that the GRU (formerly KGB) aren’t very good. Assassinations go awry, and if the rumours of Trump Golden Rain on Obama’s bed are true, so what? Trump seems unblackmailable! The GRU launched a spy ring of young girls in the 2000’s working at MIT who were so unutterably incompetent that the FBI didn’t bother to arrest them. Tatiana and Lyudmilla (cover names Tiffany and Chablis) even put sticky notes on their computers with their passwords as remembering them as well as the names of the best nightclubs in town was too much for the vodka addled brains.
...and another thing
To be a good spy is a bit like being a conman. You have to find someone gullible. At a G20 meeting in 2011 a bunch of senior ministers received a note from the Chinese spy agency on their phones saying, “For nude pictures of Carla Bruno (then France’s First Lady) click here”. Many did and downloaded spyware into their phones. Big score for Charlie Chan.
...and another thing
I rather hope that on vodka filled evenings at the Kremlin Putin actually pulls out a few eye-popping photos to share with Trump, or that King Jong Il shares some of the juicier emails he purloined from Sony with Dennis Rodman.
I even fantasise that Theresa May smirks like a schoolgirl at the sight of President Macron in schoolboy shorts being spanked by his ex-teacher wife, provided by Hassan Rouhani with a tub of beluga caviar… and a Happy Birthday card.