'There is no inkling at all that their children have any idea their parents are Russian agents," assistant United States attorney Michael Farbiarz told an engrossed federal district court room in New York last Thursday.

There was no inkling at all to anybody who knew them – their employers, their neighbours, their colleagues – that these guys could have been undercover Russian spies.

But four days prior to Farbiarz's comments, 10 "spies" were arrested in various parts of America in an operation that would spark both bewilderment and a renewed interest in Cold War espionage.

Coded messages, park-bench rendezvous, invisible ink, train-station bag swaps, coded conversations and fake passports – all the trappings we thought had disappeared with the Berlin Wall.

Despite protestations of political motives from Moscow, FBI agents involved in last week's sting insisted they had to act fast due to "critical law enforcement and operational reasons" – in other words, one of the alleged spies knew they had been rumbled.

When 10 years of surveillance and investigation finally ended in FBI raids last Sunday, the spy game was up. All have been charged with failing to register as agents of a foreign government, a crime that carries five years in prison, but one far less serious than espionage.

The choice of offence is a glaring indication of the limited dent the Russians made on the steel casing of US state secrets.

In the subsequent court hearings last Thursday, and in spite of the amusement the case has caused around the world, the denial of bail to many of the suspects showed just how serious the 'threat' was being taken.

Another suspect, "paymaster" Christopher Metsos, had already skipped bail in Cyprus, where he was arrested, and is now the subject of a manhunt – his situation would naturally have a bearing on how the US suspects were dealt with.

The charges levelled at the nine suspects showed "vast swaths of [their] lives in the United States have been simply fraudulent", the prosecution said in short bail hearings in Boston, New York and Virginia. "There is little need here for speculation as to what will happen if the defendants are permitted to walk out of the court. As Metsos did, they will flee."

The New York Times described the demeanour of some of the defendants as being that of normal parents, almost "enduring another long PTA meeting".

The neverending contradictions make the story all the more enticing for the outsider.

Wasn't Arnold Schwarzenegger a suburban humdrum father-of-one in True Lies before he dashed off to Austrian parties and rendezvous with Islamic terrorists? Weren't Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie happily married while all the while leading double lives as dangerous assassins in Mr and Mrs Smith? Forget Jean Le Carré, a Hollywood screenwriter could not have penned a more enticing ensemble of characters.

Fraudulent

Most prominently there were the Murphys – as they came to be known – the most serious of the suspects, not least of all in Ireland after news broke of Richard Murphy's fraudulent use of an Irish passport.

The US authorities have now portrayed Richard and his wife Cynthia as the most active of the spy ring. Often their two worlds collided; the FBI would say Cynthia berated her husband during bugged conversations for not gathering enough valuable information.

The couple had two children and lived in a $481,000 (€384,000) suburban home in Montclair, New Jersey, which, it later transpired, was owned by the Russian intelligence brain, the "Moscow Centre". They had been arguing with their handlers about the benefits of owning their own home, another meshing of two parallel realities.

"I'm glad I'm not your handler," Metsos supposedly told Richard Murphy after he complained about the quality of spy equipment he received. The pair met regularly.

Richard worked at home and was often seen walking his daughters to the bus stop. He was also accused of obtaining a fake Irish passport in Rome last February in the name Eunan Gerard Doherty. In another detailed incident worthy of the silver screen, Murphy was instructed to carry a copy of Time magazine and a contact would approach him with the line: "Excuse me, could we have met in Malta in 1999?" He would reply: "Yes indeed, I was in Valletta, but in 2000."

Cynthia Murphy told her curious neighbours the twang in her accent was Scandinavian.

Together, the couple, known as the "New Jersey Conspirators", were ordered through an intercepted instruction to "try to single out tidbits unknown publicly but revealed in private by sources close to State Department, government, major think tanks".

Cynthia won favour for getting close to an unnamed prominent New York financier, a man the Moscow Centre called a "very interesting target".

Venture capitalist Alan Patricof, who suspects he is the man in question, a longtime friend of the Clinton family, said the whole affair was "just staggering. It's off the charts."

The Murphys were denied bail in court last week, the judge decreeing that their identities were false while pointing to the mystery of their real backgrounds.

"The tragedy is what's going to happen with these kids," mused neighbour Alan Sokolow. They have since been taken into care.

The other suspects are just as intriguing, each with their own subplot. Anna Chapman has become something of the poster-girl spy, her looks – the archetype female Russian agent a la James Bond – proving popular with the media.

As the Murphys' story overflowed into Ireland, Chapman's was intrinsically linked to the UK where there were further questions as to the possibility of her spying there.

Widely described as a "glamorous businesswoman", the 28-year-old moved to New York two years ago. A self-proclaimed property entrepreneur and investment trader, she is believed to have suspected an FBI sting, prompting the string of arrests.

She studied in Moscow before arriving in the UK where she would remain for five years. There she swapped "Kushchenko" for Chapman and worked in a variety of jobs.

In the US, she said her aim was to establish a venture fund which she would use to broker relationships between American and Russian businessmen. But there was more to it than that.

According to the prosecution, Chapman had met regularly with a Russian government official and later with an undercover FBI agent. In one meeting at a coffee shop, typical of the bizarrely amateur operations detailed to date, she asked the agent posing as a Russian: "You're sure no one is watching?"

And yet prosecutors were quick to label her a "highly trained agent" and a "practised deceiver".

She appeared in court last Monday, immediately after the sting and was denied bail. MI5, the British intelligence agency, is continuing to probe her movements in the UK and was assisting the FBI with its inquiries.

Vicky Pelaez and Juan Lazaro, who have attracted much of the spotlight, lived in the New York suburb of Yonkers with their son Juan Jose Lazaro jr.

She was the only one accepted to have been living under her genuine name; they made no effort to keep a low profile.

Popular

Pelaez was a newspaper columnist, attracting support and criticism in equal measure for her opinions as published in El Diario La Prensa, one of the country's most popular Spanish-language newspapers. At home in Peru, she had amassed a public persona as a celebrated TV reporter.

Lazaro taught a class on Latin American politics at Baruch College where he was vocally critical of American involvement in foreign wars.

"We had someone observe his class and that person didn't think he did a very good job," said Dr Thomas Halper, chairman of the political science department. "It wasn't terrible; he just didn't do a good job and I didn't reappoint him."

Objecting to bail, prosecutors told the court Lazaro claimed he was in the pay of Russian intelligence and used his wife to transmit information.

In a letter, they continued outlining Lazaro's position: "Although he loved his son, he would not violate his loyalty to 'the service' even for his son." He also refused to clarify details regarding his true identity.

Another couple of suspects who blended seamlessly into family life were Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills, who were well known for taking their two children for a walk every evening in their Seattle neighbourhood. They later moved to Arlington.

Zottoli worked for an investment company while Mills stayed at home in their apartment.

"How would you ever think somebody next door would be involved in something like this?" said neighbour John Morrison.

"You wouldn't think a spy would care about what colour curtains or about making things look nice."

Appearing in green jump suits with the word "Prisoner" stamped on the back, the couple were a world away from their suburban charade on Thursday when they appeared in court in Alexander, Virginia.

Their bail hearing was adjourned pending further information and their children were taken into care.

Mikhail Semenko lived in Arlington. His cover was so good that even his boss couldn't counter what had happened in the whirlwind week of exposure.

He worked for a travel agency specialising in Russia and was seen as a neighbourly man with an interest in American life and culture that extended as far as supporting the New Jersey Devils ice hockey team.

Slava Shirokov, one of two owners of the business, reflected: "He's warm, not calculating. It's straight from a movie."

Semenko showed up in the same court as his fellow-Arlington residents Zottoli and Mills and asked for a court-appointed lawyer.

Membership

Donald Howard Heathfield and his "wife" Tracey Lee Ann Foley lived with their sons in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and appeared focused on their efforts to dig in.

Heathfield, an international business consultant, had sought membership of over 30 organisations with a variety of professional, academic and business interests. One had links to the Department of Homeland Security.

Agents had also accessed a safety deposit box belonging to Foley, a real-estate agent, in which they found photographic negatives produced by a Russian film company.

Their bail hearing was adjourned for two weeks to allow their defence to prepare, although they are confident of success.

Defence attorney Peter Krupp said: "It [the evidence] is extremely thin. It essentially suggests that they successfully infiltrated neighbourhoods, cocktail parties and the PTA."

Meanwhile, back in Moscow, reaction to both the arrests and details of the "covert operations" was icy.

At an official level, the foreign minister Sergei Lavrov described the timing of the arrests as "very artfully chosen" and, by implication, designed to disrupt recent positive developments in US-Russian relations.

In the background, Russian intelligence sources – once the pride of Soviet Russia – were scathing in their opinions of both the methods and the results of the alleged operations.

There remains some confusion as to why little if any important information was garnered after years of work despite a coded, intercepted message declaring: "You were sent to the USA for long-term service trip… fulfill your mission, ie to develop ties in policy-making circles in US and send intels to C[entre]."

But the benefits of any such operation have been put into doubt. "If what has been described is true," said Fedor Lukyanov, editor of Russia in Global Affairs, "then of course we can address a few questions to our foreign intelligence service about how they are using taxpayers' money."