I wouldn't hazard to guess how many foreign agents there are operating in the U.S., but I know that even before 9/11 there were a lot of investigations going on. Before the Partiot Act all federal wire interceptions had to be okayed by the attorney general or his/her immediate subordinates (they still might, I don't know for sure), and back when I was doing that sort of thing our paperwork was always being delayed in Washington because some espionage case had higher priority. Seemed to be a lot of Cubans back then.
I ran across a lot of spooks; former spies, disgraced spies, wannabes, and guys who had been spooks for governments that no longer existed. Plus bad guys of all sorts who had been trained by spooks. That's just in one city, who knows what the rest of the country is like.
The drug business was full of spook types. Lots of Eastern Bloc types and Israelis. The closest I ever came to catching one was a case involving a right-wing paramilitary group in Columbia smuggling cocaine in exchange for Soviet weapons. The dude was good,
very good (his group was bankrolled by corporations like Chiquita and had past "connections" with the CIA, Colombian intelligence and police, and even the 'Ndrangheta), and in spite of a lot of creative work he still managed to slide past my guys. I don't feel too bad about missing him though, a friend of mine at the FBI went after him right after we got skunked and was able to catch him; but he spent 13 months, millions in taxpayer dollars, flew all over the world and used a former East German Stasi agent working undercover to do it. He actually shipped East German weapons to the Virgin Islands to lure the AUC commandantes out for a look-see.
Cocaine for Kalashnikovs: The Stasi Spy Who Became an FBI Spook - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News - International
