“For unsuspecting residents of a suburban Montclair, New Jersey, neighborhood, it seemed too crazy to be believed: their quiet, unassuming neighbors had turned out to be Russian spies.
The couple, known as Richard and Cynthia Murphy, had appeared to be part of a typical American family, living in a beige, two-story colonial-style home with their two young daughters at 31 Marquette Road.
Cynthia's
business card said she worked as a financial planner at an accounting company in nearby Manhattan. Richard told neighbors he was a stay-at-home dad raising Lisa, age nine, and her 11-year-old sister, Kate.
The shocking truth emerged when the FBI raided the house in 2010: Richard and Cynthia's real names were Vladimir and Lydia Guryev.
"You could have told me they were Martians from space and I would have been less surprised," said Elizabeth Lapin, a poetry professor who still lives down the street from the home now known as "the spy house."
The Guryevs had been gathering information since the 1990s for Russia's SVR, which the FBI describes as the modern equivalent of the KGB. The KGB, if you remember, was the widely feared national security agency of the now-defunct Soviet Union, tasked during the Cold War with running a domestic secret police force and operating a network of spies throughout the world.
On June 27, 2010, the FBI arrested the Guryevs along with eight other alleged Russian spies in Manhattan, Yonkers, Boston and northern Virginia. The announcement triggered headlines reminiscent of the Cold War, and even inspired the creation of FX's 1980s-era spy drama "The Americans."“
