If they kept it out of the news, I don’t see why they should have known if nobody told them what’s going on.

It’s strange how that happened. In English “good morning” is simply a greeting, same with “good day” (or g’day in Australia) and “good afternoon”. In context, they can also be a way of saying “goodbye”. But, if you’re working the night shift and you show up at work, you can’t greet your co-worker with “good night”.

I find it cute when someone speaking Spanish says “buenas noches” as a farewell. It seems like they’re saying “hello” while waving bye. It’s obvious that they learned Spanish as a second language. But Spanish as a 2nd language is almost universally seen as endearing by Hispanophones, not like some people in the US see people that view English as a 2nd language as insufficient, lesser, or rude.

Edit: Apparently, I am mistaken. Buenas noches can be used as a farewell. Maybe there are differences due to dialect.

The funny thing is that The Americans was actually based on a similar case from 2010. In that case the kids were 16 and 20 when they found out their parents were spies.

Because Russia is hands down the best operator of these types of human intelligence networks.

Not because they’re just smarter than everyone else, or have some genetic predisposition to being better, but because they’ve had to mass-produce people with this exact skill set to maintain their own empire for over a hundred years.

What we think of as Russia, is really mostly Slavic Muscovites who have stitched together the largest continuous empire on Earth and spanning many different ethnicities and races who didn’t join by choice, but by being conquered.

It just so happens that the tradecraft and skills required for maintaining their large and diverse empire are pretty much the same ones necessary for this type of deep cover foreign espionage.