[migsvult]

two thoughts

1. In the 70's and the 80's our Soviet counter-intel was fairly compromised. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hassan are just the biggest examples. That probably does a better job explaining a Soviet CI advantage than 'we looked at the things agents did and looked for correlations.' I mean, every agency has been doing that forever.

2. There are a number of different types of cover, like the article points out. Diplomatic cover is the 'laziest' and for some (usually very low lever or very high level) people it's not really meant to fool anyone. There's private sector cover, with dummy corps and rented office buildings, and genuine P&L sheets. Private sector cover can be extremely clandestine, and extremely sophisticated. As AndrewKemendo points out, the things that this article points out are maybe not very impressive at all.

[obrero]

Hanssen was posting stories to Usenet's alt.sex.stories in the late 1990s, stories of voyeurism about his wife ( https://groups.google.com/d/msg/alt.sex.stories/3e1fHGTW_Pc/... ). He can't be said to have been keeping the lowest of profiles.