A pair of accused Russian spies tried to gather intelligence about U.S. financial markets, and potentially how to disrupt them, by feeding questions to journalists at the Russian state-owned news agency Tass, The Daily Beast has learned. The agency has a long history of giving cover to Russian spies, current and former intelligence officials say.
A criminal complaint released by the Justice Department on Monday lays out how the spies ran an alleged economic intelligence-gathering operation by developing the questions at the request of the news organization, which isn’t identified in the document, so that journalists could pose them to New York Stock Exchange employees in the course of newsgathering. The operation crossed the line between traditional reporting and espionage, in a blurry terrain where Russian spooks have long been comfortable operating.
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