From the BBC… “… British agents retrieving data from a fake rock planted on a Moscow street”
Now, I can’t claim to be an expert on espionage, but doesn’t this seem to be rather an unreliable approach to learning state secrets and all that stuff? Some hapless foreign office translator is going to be working through pages and pages of transcriptions of the sort of drivel most of us speak when walking down the street.
And of course, somewhere in the middle of all those recordings, there’ll be that needle in the haystack: “Well, as I heard when I went to the meeting at Gazprom last week, their stake in RosUkrEnergo… oh look, there’s that new pizza place. Let’s go for lunch…” [sound of hastily departing footsteps]