Thus, Moscow Center has planted in us the seeds of “Boomergeddon.” This is not the same as “Armageddon” which would involve the spies tipping Lubyanka or Yasenyevo when the president was ready to go to Def Con One, allowing the Kremlin to wipe us off the face of the earth in a cloud of radioactive dust.

Those were the good old days, you know. When it was the Soviet Union, Moscow had a great reputation with spying. Richard Sorge, their man in Tokyo, was so good that he tipped Stalin off that Hitler was about to void his pact and invade the Soviet Union.Stalin ignored him. Back in the states, Aleksandr Feklisov, assigned to the USSR embassy on 16th Street in DC, had tapped into the Manhattan Project, ran the Rosenbergs and later, using his cover last name of “Fomin,” may have served as the back channel that helped JFK and Khruschev void nuclear exchanges over Cuba.

Now we have the New Russian Spy working out of suburban Boston or New York or Virginia waiting and watching for their big moment when they can penetrate a think tank or see what the latest trend in hastily-written management books is.

What does this have to Virginia? The Old Dominion has always been a hotbed of spying. Both the CIA and the Pentagon are technically in Virginia. Agency types tend to live in Virginia because taxes are lower and commutes quicker. “The Farm,” or basic CIA school, is at Camp Peary on the York River near Williamsburg, replete with phony Cold War-style watch towers that trainees have to sneak past in the middle of the night. Department stores in Richmond or Norfolk served as “shake your tail” training grounds.

But today’s brand of spy has lost a lot of luster. One of this latest batch of long-term “illegals” actually got into a pissing match with Moscow Center over who owned his suburban house.

The shame! Attitudes like that would have gotten one a 9 mm. slug in the base of the skull in the old days. That’s what happened to Valery Matrynov and Sergei Motorin on home leave in Moscow after FBI turncoat Robert Hanssen betrayed them as having been turned by the Americans. Hanssen later was arrested in Virginia’s Foxstone Park.

Take me. I first visited the USSR in 1970-71 as a college student and was intrigued by the curiosity about me from Russian students and the walls our handlers put up to prevent us from talking to each other. In 1986, I went to Moscow as a magazine correspondent and three weeks later Nick Daniloff of U.S. News & World Report was snagged by the KGB as part of an elaborate plot to get some human bargaining chip so they could get back a Russian arrested for espionage in New York by the FBI. The Russian had no diplomatic immunity and neither did Daniloff, making a trade possible.

For the next three years, the KGB was part of my daily life. And when I was later sent to New York as an editor, they reached out to me in the form of “lunch” invitations (using a cover of a Soviet journalist) where they offered to pay my fare to go back to Mother Russia for a reporting trip. I, of course, told my magazine superiors about it and we let it go at that.

When I returned for a second tour in Moscow in 1993, the Soviet Union had collapsed. When I went to one of the spanking new grocery stores I found that the private security guards called out to me by name. They had been KGB “guards” at my apartment house masquerading as police “militia” four years before. It was like old home week.

I went to the new KGB museum at Lubyanka where hundreds of Soviet officials were executed during Stalin’s purges. The tour guide was a cold, steel-eyed retired KGB officer. We saw the exhibit of their triumphs over the CIA and other American intelligence. During the early days of the Cold War in the 1950s, the CIA recruited Ukrainians, trained them and then parachuted them inside the USSR’s western borders. Their mission was to blow train bridges and electrical plants should the day come.

Most were quickly picked up when they hit the ground since they had been turned by the illustrious British spy Kim Philby. Another fatal give-away, the KGB man told us, was that the stupid CIA used stainless steel staples in the terrorists’ fake passports. Anyone who has ever been to Russia knows that their passports have old fashioned steel staples, so there is always a smudge of rust between the pages.

Being a smart ass, I asked, “Do they still make that mistake?” The KGB man gave me a snake-killing stare for a good minute and then replied, “No, they make others.”

Of course, we may not know all the circumstances behind this current run of spying. However, it probably reveals the lack of understanding among the “siloviki” related to Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer turned Russian leader. They can get critical facts and figures for free from Web-based sources, including Bacon’s Rebellion.

You heard it here first, Volodya!

Peter Galuszka