It’s actually not that rare for the FBI’s counterintelligence staff to contact professors who work in sensitive fields, especially in science and technology, and who frequently travel abroad to warn them about the possibility that they may be approached by people who are actually spies. These people may try to have a sexual relationship with them or to offer them some lucrative business deal rather than coming out and trying to recruit them to betray their country. In Carter Page’s case, it went a bit deeper than this because it wasn’t a precautionary meeting. Page really was being recruited and the spies were eventually expelled. Page met with the FBI in 2013 and the spies were moved out of the country in 2015.
What’s really unusual about this case though is that Page responded defensively by telling the FBI that their time would be better spent worrying about real threats like the Boston Marathon bombers. And then Page went right out a couple of months later and told people that he had ties to the Kremlin as a way of promoting his academic credentials. The people that I’ve known who have had visits from the FBI’s counterintelligence team were a little freaked out but also respectful of the process and a little more careful going forward about their foreign contacts. They understood that the FBI was trying to protect them as well as the country and our technological secrets and advantages. The last thing they would have done is go around bragging about their connections to the Chinese or Russian government right after being warned that those governments might be trying to compromise them.
So, Page is a kook and heedless of the normal precautions, but I think that’s also why he has been such an easy mark. They promise him business deals and he’s all too happy to adopt their political line. It’s hard to figure out if he’s crazy like a fox or just dumb enough to not understand why he’s been getting so much attention.
