She was lurking in the Ivy, ready to pounce.
Accused Russian spy Cynthia Murphy used her cover as a Columbia University MBA student to try to turn her capitalist classmates into comrades, federal officials say.
Murphy, code-named “N” by her Moscow handlers, not only tried to recruit secret agents, she also had another nefarious mission — digging up dirt on fellow students who expressed interest in or were signed up for jobs at the CIA, a criminal complaint says.
The shocking charges against Murphy, 35 — who received her master’s of business administration from Columbia in May — are laid out in the federal criminal complaint unsealed after she and her husband Richard were busted earlier this week, along with eight other US residents who allegedly worked for “Moscow Central.”
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According to the complaint, Russia’s SVR spy agency last year sent electronic messages that were intercepted by US law enforcement. One of these messages directed Murphy “to strengthen . . . ties w/ classmates on daily basis incl. professors who can help in job search and who will have (or already have) access to secret info,” the complaint says.
Murphy’s bosses also allegedly told her to spy on teachers and classmates with an eye toward turning them into secret agents for Russia.
“Report to C[enter] on their detailed personal data and character traits w. preliminary conclusions about their potential (vulnerability) to be recruited by Service,” the spymasters wrote.
In response to those orders, the Murphys “on many occasions” gave Moscow Center the names of professors and students affiliated with Columbia, which were then checked against the spy agency’s database “to determine is a particular potential ‘target’ was or was not ‘clean,’ ” the complaint alleges.
“Thus, for example, when an SVR database check revealed that a particular contact of Cynthia Murphy’s had been suspected by a then-Soviet bloc intelligence service of belonging to ‘a foreign spy net[work],’ Murphy was told to ‘avoid deepening contact with them for sec[urity] reasons,’ ” according to the criminal complaint.
Murphy was also instructed to ” ‘dig up’ personal data of those students who apply (or are hired already) for a job at CIA,” the Russians allegedly wrote.
Cynthia and Richard Murphy spent years living in Hoboken, NJ, and most recently lived in Montclair, NJ, with their two young daughters.
The brown-haired mom also was working as a $135,000- a-year financial analyst for Morea Financial Services — a lower Manhattan firm that her spymasters allegedly hoped would give her access to sensitive political information.
The criminal complaint says that Cynthia and Richard over the years “spent a great deal of time collecting information and passing it to Moscow Center,” which asked them to gather intelligence about the US stance on arms talks with Russia, the war in Afghanistan and Iran’s nuclear program, among other issues.
In particular, the complaint said, Cynthia was ordered to pump a client named Alan Patricof for information about American foreign policy and White House scuttlebutt. Patricof is a financier who raised money for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate and presidential campaigns.
Patricof released a statement saying that while he met Murphy “a limited number of times” and spoke with her frequently on the phone about personal financial matters, “we never, not once, discussed politics, the government or world affairs.”
Murphy began pursuing her MBA at Columbia in the fall of 2008, enrolling in the “Executive MBA” program — designed for businesspeople who are already working full-time jobs.
She already had received a bachelor’s degree in finance from NYU’s Leonard Stern School of Business in 2000 and an NYU associate’s degree in 1997.
At Columbia yesterday, classics major Leigh Gerber, 23, said the charges against Murphy are “so cool. It’s exciting.”
“I’m not super-surprised. Someone like that probably has a lot of skills to spy. And the same skills probably got her in.”
Additional reporting by Rebecca Rosenberg and Carolyn Salazar