The Philadelphia version of a Soviet 'American village'

Michael Smerconish: The Philadelphia version of a Soviet 'American village'
7.8.10
By Michael Smerconish - Daily News
Philadelphia Daily News
Daily News Opinion Columnist

RICHARD and Cynthia Murphy are the picture of suburbia.
The couple suspected of espionage on behalf of Mother Russia were captured on camera seated at a table full of American goodies: Bud Light, Coca-Cola, Heinz ketchup, hamburger buns, paper plates and towels on a checkered cloth. Richard Murphy has a cheeseburger in one hand and a Coors Light in the other. His wife is putting the finishing touches on the food in front of her.

The picture could've been taken anywhere in the country, especially around Independence Day.

So how did two Russians manage to perfect American life all the way down to the details of a typical barbecue?

Glenmore Trenear-Harvey, a former British intelligence officer, told me there were several "villages" in the former Soviet Union built to replicate U.S. and British towns. Prospective spies not only studied English there, but they also underwent a "deep immersion" in the subtleties of American life. Everything from the cars to the post offices was westernized. The lessons included "knowing that you stand in line, you don't rush to front of the queue, all of these kind of things," Trenear-Harvey said.

UNTIL NOW, such a plotline was largely the stuff of fiction. The 1977 movie "Telefon," for instance, starred Charles Bronson as a Cold War-era intelligence officer trying to stop a network of KGB sleeper agents carrying out suicide missions in the U.S.

More recently, Nelson DeMille's "The Charm School" told the story of hundreds of American pilots shot down during the Vietnam War. To the U.S., the pilots were MIA. To the KGB, they became valuable assets of "Mrs. Ivanova's Charm School" - a KGB operation in which the pilots taught Russian agents how to immerse themselves in American life.

When he was researching the book, DeMille said, he caught wind of a persistent rumor about the Institute of American and Canadian Studies. "It seemed like an academic institution, but actually it was a KGB-run operation teaching Russians not only how to speak English, but how to speak it like an American," he told me.
"And a spin-off of that, apparently, were these one or two villages west of Moscow that tried to reproduce American life - if you can imagine the Russians in the Soviet days trying to reproduce American life. They probably couldn't even get a bottle of Coca-Cola."

Things have changed, as the Murphy barbecue spread proves. I thought such decades-long covert missions had gone the way of fallout shelters and "flexible responses" - clearly not the case.
Which got me thinking: What would such a "village" look like today if we wanted it modeled on the Philadelphia area?

Real suburbia would have to feature a Cheesecake Factory with an inexplicable line weaving out the door and around the corner. Nearby, we'd need a few big-box retailers. Target and Best Buy next to Dick's and Old Navy. Lowe's across the parking lot from Barnes & Noble. Maybe a Whole Foods or Trader Joe's.
The parking lots would be crammed with SUVs driven by soccer moms sipping venti iced coffees from Starbucks.

And speaking of high-calorie drinks, the locals would have to be overweight to be authentic. So would most of the kids, who spend much of their time texting and video-chatting on their laptops - all monitored by school officials.

The cable TV would display polar-opposite political debate, sans much that reflects the political middle, and 800 other channels offering little of interest. To supply those TVs, you'd need unsightly dishes on the rowhouses and McMansions.

Indeed, those houses and the surrounding lots would all look the same - right down to the workers outside, whose immigration status would, for authenticity's sake, be questionable.
And to indoctrinate Russian agents on how Americans worship, there'd have to be a football cathedral named for a corporate entity, with signage ready to be flipped on at a moment's notice.
Inside, billionaire owners would sit in superboxes watching millionaire athletes bask in the adulation or bear the jeers of the entire village. Sometimes both over the course of a single game.

It's not perfect, the Russian agents might think, but it beats those brutal Moscow winters.

Michael Smerconish, weekdays 5-9 a.m. on the Big Talker, 1210/AM. Read him Sundays in the Inquirer. Contact him via the Web at www.smerconish.com.