Russian Spy Recruited at Columbia University

Talk about an easy job. If you're a Russian spy and busy yourself looking for some friendly comrades, where else would you go than an Ivy League university? It's not as if the students and professors at these elite institutions hide their political leanings.

She was lurking in the Ivy, ready to pounce.

Accused Russian spy Cynthia Murphy used her cover as a Columbia University MBA student to try to turn her capitalist classmates into comrades, federal officials say.

Murphy, code-named "N" by her Moscow handlers, not only tried to recruit secret agents, she also had another nefarious mission -- digging up dirt on fellow students who expressed interest in or were signed up for jobs at the CIA, a criminal complaint says.

The shocking charges against Murphy, 35 -- who received her master's of business administration from Columbia in May -- are laid out in the federal criminal complaint unsealed after she and her husband Richard were busted earlier this week, along with eight other US residents who allegedly worked for "Moscow Central."

According to the complaint, Russia's SVR spy agency last year sent electronic messages that were intercepted by US law enforcement. One of these messages directed Murphy "to strengthen . . . ties w/ classmates on daily basis incl. professors who can help in job search and who will have (or already have) access to secret info," the complaint says.

Murphy's bosses also allegedly told her to spy on teachers and classmates with an eye toward turning them into secret agents for Russia.

"Report to C[enter] on their detailed personal data and character traits w. preliminary conclusions about their potential (vulnerability) to be recruited by Service," the spymasters wrote.

In response to those orders, the Murphys "on many occasions" gave Moscow Center the names of professors and students affiliated with Columbia, which were then checked against the spy agency's database "to determine is a particular potential 'target' was or was not 'clean,' " the complaint alleges.

"Thus, for example, when an SVR database check revealed that a particular contact of Cynthia Murphy's had been suspected by a then-Soviet bloc intelligence service of belonging to 'a foreign spy net[work],' Murphy was told to 'avoid deepening contact with them for sec[urity] reasons,' " according to the criminal complaint.

Murphy was also instructed to " 'dig up' personal data of those students who apply (or are hired already) for a job at CIA," the Russians allegedly wrote.

Meanwhile, in a stunning development, that "progressive" New York couple we mentioned the other day was actually referred to as leftists by the Associated Press. Much of what's reported there we already unearthed but this nugget is something fresh worth noting.

While Pelaez continued to pursue her career as a columnist, Lazaro studied at the New School for Social Research, now called The New School, a university in Manhattan.

In 1990, Lazaro published a study in a leftist European journal about the positive role of women as combatants in Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, a violent Maoist insurgency in Peru that had peaked in the 1980s before government security forces cracked down on it.

"It seems that sexism, normally one of the stronger barriers limiting female performance in guerrilla actions to support roles in the majority of the revolutionary movements, has been overcome by the Sendero Luminoso," Lazaro wrote in the study, called "Women and Political Violence in Contemporary Peru."

Ask Lori Berenson about that positive role in the Shining Path.

Pelaez, through her El Diario column, aggressively criticized the U.S. government and defended illegal immigrants. Her pieces are widely reprinted on left-leaning websites.

Hmm. Maybe she was on the JournoList. Anyone willing to take that $100K so we can find out?

I suspect most if not all of those "left-leaning" websites will be scrubbing the archives and not making much note of this spy case.

A good roundup of the charges and background the the suspects here and th elatest on the idiotic decision in Cyprus to set low bail for the spy paymaster.

Finally, check out the media's favorite spy in action.


If this girl walks she'll no doubt be a reality star before long. If any of you guys are interested, be sure to note looks aren't important, apparently.