Finally. Spies like us.
After the series of Jason Bourne movies, in which even an amnesiac can defeat the best the spook world has to offer, and the impossibly hot Kevin Costner as a Russian plant in the U.S. Navy, and the volcanic spy couple of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
After the dweebs, nerds and religious nuts of the 1980s and 1990s — Aldrich Ames, the John Walker clan, Jonathan Pollard and Robert Hanssen — who sold secrets and their vacant souls for millions.
Finally, we have spies like us: a collection of Russians posing as suburbanites and hidden under such deep cover that, as David Letterman said, they could pretend to like World Cup soccer.
A bunch of moms and dads instructed by Moscow Center to see if they could recruit a disaffected bureaucrat or pick up some minor nuclear weapons chatter at a neighborhood barbecue.
Ten Russian "illegals," eight of whom were paired off as married couples and three of those couples with kids, were rounded up last week after a years-long investigation and not charged with espionage because they were remarkably unsuccessful at collecting anything that couldn't also be found on a Google search.
Instead, they are being held for being in this country illegally, which considering this country's immigration mess, might be tough case to make, too.
You have to love the Russians, stuck in a dusty KGB drama decades out of date, so George Smiley that they still believe that America's free press and its bumpy democracy are just cover for a secret agenda of world domination to which only a few powerful men are privy.
The Russian government apparently spent millions recruiting and training these neighborhood spies, creating elaborate "legends" and then dropping them on the fringes of New York, Washington and Boston, where they got American degrees, American jobs and lived American lives for perhaps 20 years.
According to court documents, there were dead-letter drops, invisible ink, microfilm, cash wrapped in newspapers and handed off on trains, cash buried in upstate New York. (Have you noticed? Things are always getting buried in upstate New York. Or somewhere in New Jersey.)
But these spies are so like the rest of us that they had to write down passwords that they couldn't remember and had trouble with ATM machines, and I am guessing, TiVo.
They used code phrases that apparently came from "Keeping Up with the Kardashians": "Haven't we met in California last summer?"
But they also gardened, walked their kids to the bus stop, had Facebook pages on which they "liked" hockey, belonged to the PTA and had arguments with the home office about how difficult it was to keep up with the Joneses in the cul-de-sac.
(Memo to Moscow: Americans don't really want their children to have fun in sports. They want them to win, baby, win. And they don't think everyone should get a chance to play if that means their child doesn't make the starting lineup.)
The whole thing sounds like a pitch for a sequel to "The Incredibles," the movie about the mis-adventures of a family of undercover superheroes.
There is even a Bond girl at the head of this crew. Anna Chapman, a hot-looking 28-year-old Internet real estate wunderkind whose on-line photos are getting more hits than Susan Boyle singing and who ran things from a coffee shop.
If in fact these spies were as unproductive as they appear to have been, then I think we should let them stay until the kids graduate from high school.
And we should worry more about terrorists getting onto airplanes with bombs in their shorts.
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