FBI: Cambridge software CEO was really a Russian spy

Welcome to 1969: The FBI reports arresting ten people, including a Cambridge couple, on charges they were really Russian spies.

One of the locals went by the name Donald Howard Heathfield - which the FBI says was an alias, based on the name of an actual, but dead, Canadian. Using that name, Heathfield ran Future Map, a company that listed a trade group of US multinationals, a European semiconductor maker and a global pharmaceutical concern as customers of its process for preparing for the future. In fact, he holds a US patent for predicting the future (Ed note: Doesn't seem to have helped him much). And he claims a master's from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government (where one of his classmates was State Rep. Marty Walz, D-Back Bay).

He and his wife, Tracey Lee Ann Foley, claimed to be naturalized US citizens born in Canada, according to an FBI affidavit. They have been in the US since 1999.

Both were to be arraigned in US District Court in Boston today.

The FBI said it had been following the "Russian intelligence program within the United States" for several years. The FBI says it searched their Cambridge home in 2006 to collect evidence against the ring. According to the affidavit, the "Boston conspirators" were charged with obtaining information on US foreign policy, including real US estimates of Russian foreign policy, but also anything about what the US knows about terrorists using the Internet. In 2006, the couple allegedly filed a report on a changeover in CIA management; in 2008, they prepared a report on the presidential election. Among their alleged contacts: "contacts within Congress and policymakers within Washington," as well as "a former high-ranking United States Government national security official."

In 2004, the FBI says, Heathfield met with a US nuclear-weapons researcher about such topics as "bunker-buster" bombs. In 2007, he was allegedly attempting to recruit students in Washington, DC to provide information.

The government charges the pair made extensive use of steganography, a technique for hiding secret messages inside seemingly innocuous computer graphics, to communicate with Moscow, and that they would do so by posting the images on publicly accessible Web sites. They also allegedly used "radiograms," or encoded messages sent via shortwave radio, the FBI says.

The affidavit doesn't specify what the alleged spies were learning, but does say agents intercepted mundane expense reports paid by Moscow, for example, $700 in lawyer's fees and $1,125 for a business meeting.

Innocent, etc.

Thanks to Joe Mellor for his assistance.