Washington, DC -
Waves of civil servants, military and law enforcement officers, business people, students, diplomats and tourists saturate the city.
That is the scene on a typical weekday in the world’s most powerful city — whose business revolves around secret meetings, information and documents. Woven into that orderly bedlam are sophisticated networks of foreign nationals whose sole purpose is to steal secrets.
They are spies. According to the International Spy Museum in D.C., an educational and historical center of U.S. intelligence documentation and artifacts, there are
“more than 10,000 spies in Washington.”
While there may be some quibbling about the actual numbers,
the FBI agrees with the premise. “It’s unprecedented — the threat from our foreign adversaries, specifically China on the
economic espionage and the espionage front,” said Brian Dugan, Assistant Special Agent in Charge for Counterintelligence with the FBI’s Washington Field Office.
As this unparalleled wave of international espionage,
aided by technology, explodes in D.C., the variety of spies has diversified, as well.
“A spy is nondescript. A spy is going to be someone that’s going to be a student in school, a visiting professor, your neighbor. It could be a colleague or someone that shares the soccer field with you,” Dugan said.
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