From James Bond to Bail Bonds
From Russia (to Dallas) with love: Texas gets in on the sexy spy thing
Latvian-born Dallasite Anna Fermanova was arrested July 15 when she returned to the United States after visiting her Russian husband, apparently for being the latest in an attractive ring of Russian spies. The 24-year-old had been stopped in New York en route to Moscow back in March, when she was found carrying some advanced night-vision rifle scopes without a license in her Ugg Boots.
Fermanova said they were for her husband's hunting hobby.
Besides it being rather surreal to, in 2010, be reading so many headlines about Russian spies, we (along with Fermanova's lawyer) see some problems with this story.
First, she's not Russian — she's Latvian. She's also a United States citizen, and has been since she was 9 years old.
She lives in Russia with her husband (spending the minority of the year at her parent's house in Plano, where she is now under house arrest), so it's not suspicious she'd commute to Moscow. And we give her the benefit of the doubt for not realizing night vision scopes were on the U.S. Munitions List. How many times have we made it through JFK with some old forgotten pot?
What kind of SPY maintains a Facebook page? OK, apparently every sexy Russian spy. Still as the Dallas Morning News reports, Fermanova alerts her neighbors when she has a house party so they don't call the cops. That's not very sneaky.
"She is quite sexy, you could say, but she is not a spy," Fermanova's attorney, Scott Palmer, says.
The only thing pseudo-sketchy about Fermanova is her Russian husband, who the UK's Telegraph says is involved in "imports and exports." Even so, has someone at the State Department been watching too much Bond?