It is heartening to know that even alleged Russian spies have problems with their computers. Anna Chapman complained about the difficulties she had establishing a private wireless local area network to her handler UC-I, so that she could communicate with the van parked outside the coffee shop. Suspicions were mutual. C or Moscow Centre never quite understood why the couple who went under the name of Richard and Cynthia Murphy had to buy that house in New Jersey: "We are under the impression that C views our ownership of the house as a deviation from the original purpose of the mission," they said in an intercepted message.
The Murphys told C, perhaps somewhat defensively: "It was a convenient way to solving the housing issue, plus 'to do as the Romans do' in a society that values home ownership."
What did C expect? If they want 11 "illegals" to go native in America in order to establish a long-term, deep cover, then obviously home ownership in New Jersey beckons. Mrs Murphy did a good job. She certainly fooled the neighbours. "They couldn't have been spies," said Jessie Gugig. "Look what she did with the hydrangeas."
The 55-page indictment filed by the FBI revealing the existence of 11 (the 11th has been arrested in Cyprus) alleged spies who had spent years adopting false US identities, will not, however, make pleasant reading for C – otherwise known as Russia's External Intelligence Service, the SVR.
The FBI operation represents the biggest penetration of the SVR communications in recent memory. The FBI read their emails, decrypted their intel, read the embedded coded texts on images posted on the net, bugged their mobile phones, videotaped the passing of bags of cash and messages in invisible ink from one agent to another, and hacked into their bogus expenses claims.
Spies who defect paint a lurid picture of their former bosses. Their kiss-and-tell books are inevitably presented as "wake-up" calls to their new masters. Sergei Tretyakov, who worked as a press officer at the Russian Mission of the United Nations in New York, but in fact ran a number of agents in the US and the UN, was the last SVR spy to defect.
In Comrade J: The Untold Secrets of Russia's Master Spy in America After the End of the Cold War, by Pete Earley, Tretyakov said that nothing had changed. The "main enemy" defined by Soviet military doctrine in the cold war, had simply become the "main target".
"Nothing has changed. Russia is doing everything it can today to embarrass the US. Let me repeat this. Russia is doing everything it can today to undermine and embarrass the US. The SVR residenturas in the US are not less, but in some aspects even more active today than during the cold war. What should that tell you?"
But something, surely has changed. The tradecraft used by the alleged SVR ring was amateurish, and will send shivers down the spine of the rival intelligence organisations in Russia. This was bungling on a truly epic scale. No secrets about bunker-busting bombs were actually obtained, but the network was betrayed. The defendants are not charged with espionage, but with charges like conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government. To have a spy ring uncovered before they could actually do any serious spying is doubly embarrassing.
Not that anyone in MI6 here in Britain should gloat. In the last decade, we have had two major expulsions of our spies in Moscow, who were caught on film red-handed trying to do exactly what the FBI caught the Murphys at. In one case, the British resident spymaster used a mentally unstable junior Russian diplomat, Platon Obukhov, to spy on his father, a former Soviet deputy foreign minister and one of the main negotiators of the intermediate nuclear forces treaty removing medium-range missiles from Europe.
The FBI waited three days after the Russian president Dmitry Medvedev's most successful foreign tour to date before making their arrests. During that, Barack Obama and Medvedev shared a cheeseburger in Arlington, Virginia; the Russian president toured Silicon Valley and emerged with his very own iPhone 4 from Steve Jobs. More than this, he won a pledge from Cisco Systems to invest $1bn as a tenant in Skolkovo, the Kremlin's pet project to create its own Silicon Valley outside Moscow.
Revelations about spy rings are the last thing a politician like Medvedev, who presents himself as a moderniser, needs. He has inveighed against the rule of lawlessness in Russia but struggles to the make the case that he can do anything about it.
Perhaps there was a covert message in all this that Washington was sending to Moscow. You can have the old relationship or the new one, but you would get more out of us through the front door.