The New York Daily News has a story of a family who were friends with Montclair’s alleged Russian spies after meeting them in 2003 when the Murphys lived in Hoboken. The couple, who say they felt betrayed after learning of their friends’ alleged spy activities, spoke on condition of anonymity. They also shared an album of photos of the Murphy family.

“I look back at it now and think, ‘We let them watch our kids!’ Russian spies watching our kids,” the husband said.

The Hoboken friends got close enough to the Murphys to have dinners together (Cynthia was lauded as a great cook and even baked cookies shaped like the Statue of Liberty), barbecues and attend a birthday party for one of the Murphy daughters. The last contact from the Murphys came with a photo Christmas card in December 2009, taken in front of their home on Marquette Road.

Liz George is the publisher of Montclair Local. liz@montclairlocal.news

10 replies on “Friends Of Montclair Russian Spies Tell All”

  1. “The couple … spoke on condition of anonymity.”
    Who are THEY spying for?
    Perhaps these FOS’s (friends of Spies) can get some $$ from the US Gov for their “pain and suffering”?

  2. “They lived right by me”, ” I used to talk to that guy all the time”..People come out of the wood work to be connected to “sensational stories”.

  3. Sharing an album of the family, which I will assume includes photos of the children, seems pretty shady in and of itself to me.

  4. I don’t get the shock and awe over this. There are probably spies all over the place, ours theirs, someones. We’ve got spies all over too.

  5. This “event” is such a surreal cross between 1952 and April Fools’ day.
    Fooled by the neighbors – film at 11.
    But WHY?

  6. Someone who worked for the NSA once told me that most of his labors for several years early in his career basically consisted of going through publicly available records, such as trade magazines, for economic data and statistics. Then comparing it against other sources. He also regularly scanned photos of Soviet armed forces units stationed across Warsaw Pact nations for their cap badges, to try and assess military strength and troop movements.
    Spying is often, in other words, tedious work which entails checking and rechecking through the obvious. It seems akin in many ways to indexing and proofing. It’s certainly not all “Falcon and Snowman” or Rosenberg-type stuff.
    That noted, the Feds have yet to supply any real details of such “spying” in this case. (As I understand it, the alleged spies haven’t even been indicted yet.)
    Oddly, too, there hasn’t yet been the usual flurry of diplomatic embarassments and transfers which usually accompanies such matters. So the matter is fine as an excuse for Baristanet to milk it unmercifully for a few weeks as a means of reaping those key-to-advertisers hits and visits. (Against the general trend of slow news days, that is.) But in reality, very little of substance has yet surfaced in this case (especially from such a slowly dying venture as the Daily News), and that should also be acknowledged.

  7. Sounds like the “The Spy Who Shagged Me”. I expect Mike Myers to appear at any moment.

  10. Here’s a tip for any journalist still lurking. (That’s about all of Montclair, and many readers here.
    From whom did the Murphys buy their house? Who was the broker?
    Did they have a mortgage? How did they get one?
    And of concern to all of us, what is going to happen to it now that its ostensible owners are not likely to keep paying the taxes on it?

Comments are closed.