Last week the Federal Bureau of Investigation announced that it has made several arrests of alleged long-term Russian spies living undercover in the United States.

These deep-cover spies had been living in the United States since the 1990s, primarily in the New England area, working civilian jobs and attempting to gain access to a broad array of information. There were eleven arrests made on June 27, ten accused spies and one financier. The ten alleged spies had fake passports claiming to be American, Canadian or Peruvian, when all were actually Russian nationals.

Their reported objectives, broadly categorized, were to attempt to gain access to U.S. policy-making circles, learning about new technology (not from a government level, but more like a university level), gathering information about the 2008 presidential election, and even obscure things such as following the gold market.

The group held a variety of mainly white-collar jobs ranging from consulting and investing firms to owning a real estate business and even writing columns for a New York newspaper. A few of the Russian nationals attended prestigious U.S. universities, with one even earning a master’s degree from Harvard.

Excuse me, is this 1957?

While these FBI reports certainly sound like perfect movie-making material, it leavessome wondering whether this startling and seemingly unexpected event will prove detrimental to attempts to improve American-Russian relations.

It may seem contrary to initial reaction, but my firm belief is that this won’t have any significant impact on our relationship with our former Cold War enemy, and there are a number of reasons why.

First, from an intelligence standpoint, it shouldn’t be too surprising that a powerful foreign nation has spies in our country. Practically every country that has the means spies on other countries in one way or another, and if Russia has spies here I would be astounded if we didn’t have spies there.

Second, this announcement comes just days after Russian president Dmitri Medvedev’s two-day visit to Silicon Valley, where he met with President Obama to discuss better economic ties between our countries.

The United States government has known about this spy operation for some time now, so its announcement was surely delayed out of respect of Medvedev, and also to avoid pressure for Obama and Medvedev to discuss the issue publicly.

Also, if you look at the FBI report you can see that while this operation had many sophisticated aspects to it, it also had many blunders and reeked the commonality of a remote, out-dated government project struggling to prove its worth to its superiors. Out of the transcripts between the alleged spies one even complains “they [Russian HQ] don’t understand what we have to go through here.”

Since this operation has been going on for the better part of twenty years, it’s clear that current president Medvedev, and even Prime Minister Putin, were probably not involved in its initial execution. Its timing of the early 1990s, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, means the operation could very likely have been cooked up by what are known in Russian as ‘siloviki’ — former officials that held office in the USSR — and managed to stick around and keep government posts after its collapse.

Lastly, it is curious to note what the alleged spies were charged with. All of them were charged with conspiracy to act as an agent of a foreign government without notifying the Attorney General, which carries only a maximum of 5 years in prison. Additionally, some of them were charged with money laundering conspiracy charges, which carries a heftier maximum of 20 years in prison. However, if this spy-operation had yielded valuable information and the United States wasn’t attempting to improve relations with Russia, these foreign nationals probably would have been slapped with outright espionage charges, which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

The fact that this long-term operation has been functioning for almost two decades now, still has no focused or concentrated objective and has seemingly provided nothing of importance to Russia indicates it is probably not a high-priority mission and that the US regarded it as necessary to prosecute the individuals in our country, but does not hold the current executive powers in Russia responsible and does not wish this situation to have a severe adverse affect on our attempts to improve relations with Russia.