To their neighbours, the Murphys, alleged Russian spies, 'were apple pie, motherhood and the American flag', writes LARA MARLOWEin Montclair, New Jersey
FOR 20 hours after the fleet of police cars and black FBI sedans descended on their quiet street on the evening of June 27th, the inhabitants of Marquette Road watched, whispered and wondered.
They saw the couple they knew as Cynthia and Richard Murphy led out in handcuffs and driven away in separate cars. (Both are believed to be Russian citizens. Their real names have not been revealed.) They saw Katie (11) arrive home an hour or so later, carrying a styrofoam floater from the swimming party she had attended. After 20 minutes, Katie and her younger sister Lisa (7) emerged from the house carrying rucksacks and sleeping bags.
“They looked absolutely stunned,” says Alan Sokolow, who lives three doors down. An “FBI lady” entrusted the girls to the woman who had driven Katie home.
“All of us were speculating,” recalls Elizabeth Lapin, who lives four doors from the house the Murphys bought with $481,000 from the Russian intelligence agency SVR in 2008. “We thought of white-collar crime, terrorism, drugs. Somebody suggested money laundering . . . nobody said spies.”
At about 4pm on the day after the arrests, a neighbour’s daughter heard the news on the radio in Boston.
“I said, spies? Russian spies?” Lapin recalls. “It was like someone told me there were Martians living next door.”
Then the media circus started. Parents are still keeping children off the street to shelter them from the reporters, photographers and television crews who go door-to- door seeking recollections and reactions.
An anonymous couple who befriended the Murphys when they lived in an apartment in Hoboken sold their story and snapshots to the New York Daily News, which published it under a “Moscow On The Hudson” logo, complete with Russian flags and revolvers, although firearms figured in none of the court documents.
The tabloid’s scoop: unsuspecting Americans entrusted their children to be babysat by spies! And Cynthia Murphy baked cookies shaped like the Statue of Liberty.
Murphy (35) and her daughters were “a breath of fresh air,” Lapin says sadly. “I remember her walking up from the bus stop, where she commuted to work in Manhattan, carrying cut flowers, with sunlight in her hair; another time, a baguette. These are troubled times. You don’t see people coming home from work looking happy, but she didn’t look troubled . . .
“She was sweet, kind, she seemed good. I can’t believe she’s not going through a kind of hell now.”
Neighbours speak nostalgically of the Murphy daughters, of their bright eyes and blonde hair, racing bicycles down Marquette Road, throwing water balloons in the street, selling lemonade with other children. Katie befriended a three-legged dog called Montana, who belonged to an Indian family.
Katie won three awards at 5th grade graduation at Hillside Grammar School the Friday before her parents were arrested. She had demonstrated a special gift for poetry.
When I dropped by Hillside, summer students laughed and chattered on the lawn. I couldn’t help thinking that Katie and Lisa’s childhood ended last Sunday night.
Cynthia Murphy seems to have lived out her own American dream. She completed a bachelor’s degree in finance at NYU and had just earned an MBA from Columbia Business School, while raising two daughters and working full time. She took pride in her garden in Montclair. “Garden angel” is painted on the cut-out sculpture of an angel nailed to a tree.
Murphy’s colleagues at Morea Financial Services, the firm where Cynthia earned $135,000 a year as a financial planner, thought her accent was Belgian. Because the girls were so blonde, one neighbour assumed she was Scandinavian.
“She looks very Slavic, now that we are trying to put the pieces together,” Lapin says.
It is not clear from court documents whether Richard Murphy (39) was merely a “gofer” who served as a link between Christopher Metsos (the 11th spy who has jumped bail in Cyprus) and the others, or the ring-leader, as intelligence officials now claim.
Murphy dispensed cash and equipment that he received from Moscow to co-conspirators. His imminent departure from the US is said to have triggered the FBI dragnet.
Neighbour Alan Sokolow describes Murphy as “an enigma” with “a sour expression, not someone who chatted with people”. Neighbours rarely saw him during the nearly two years the Murphys lived at number 31.
The couple who spoke to the Daily News thought Richard was studying international relations. “Who knows what he was?” Lapin comments ironically. “Everyone thought: how nice, we have a stay-at-home father.”
The sophisticated technology of steganography, which according to the Washington Post the Murphys used more than 100 times to communicate with Moscow, is a perfect metaphor for their life in Montclair.
In steganography, a banal photograph, for example a flower, is posted on the internet. Concealed somewhere in the image is a text file.
The Murphys “were apple pie, motherhood and the American flag,” says Thomas Giblin, state assemblyman for Montclair. “They didn’t seem odd or different. They blended in with the landscape.”
Giblin echoes the question raised most often about the spy ring. “In this day and age, what information were they trying to get that’s not freely available? The [Berlin] wall broke down, our presidents were meeting [last week]. What kind of deep, dark secrets were they trying to penetrate?”
The answer, experts say, is that for intelligence agencies, the Cold War never ended. After the fall of the Soviet Union, prime minister Vladimir Putin – a former colonel in the KGB – rebuilt its intelligence agencies. Running “illegals” – sleeper spies who work without cover of diplomatic immunity – was a staple of Soviet spycraft and the agency apparently reverted to standard practice.
Visiting Montclair is like stepping back half a century, to wholesome family life in clapboard houses with shutters and children playing in the streets, to sitcoms entitled Leave it to Beaver and Ozzie and Harriet. Now memories of a contradictory but equally outdated image permeate the surface idyll: the America of McCarthyism and “Reds under the bed”.
Even US leaders no longer seem to take the Russians seriously. How else does one explain that former president Bill Clinton, meeting Putin outside Moscow on Tuesday, laughed when Putin railed against American police being “out of control”?
If this spy ring was dangerous, why did President Barack Obama’s spokesman announce: “I do not believe this will affect the resetting of our relationship with Russia”?
Sokolow says: “If it had been people from the Middle East, mixed up with the Taliban or al- Qaeda, everybody would be very frightened.
“I grew up under the shadow of the McCarthy hearings and the Red menace. If it had happened then, in the 1950s, everyone would have been very frightened, but now, it just seems bizarre and . . . non-threatening.”