The trigger for the crisis was the arrest last month of Robert Hanssen, a senior FBI agent accused of selling secrets to Moscow over a 15-year period. Last week, the Bush administration expelled four Russian diplomats from the US and ordered another46 to leave by July. Moscow swiftly retaliated, handing an equal number of Americans their walking papers on Friday. Moscow reacted angrily to a US State Department report that depicted the human rights picture in Russia as dire,and is steaming over the Bush administration's decision to officially receive representatives of the rebel government of Chechnya in Washington tomorrow. The US is particularly miffed by the Hanssen case, which seems stark evidence that the vast former Soviet spying machine remains alive and active.
Experts agree that the level of spying on both sides has increased in recent years.
Some say that Russia under Putin has revived the old KGB programme of powering economic modernization through systematic theft of Western industrial and military secrets. Espionage activities are at an unprecedentedly high level. And that is just the tip of the iceberg.