New York has long been a hub of Russian spies because the Russian Mission to the U.N. was a way of getting agents into the United States, where they could work covertly and recruit Americans to their cause, Mr. Lucas added.

A few of our city’s most famous Soviet spies include:

• Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a Manhattan couple accused of perpetuating the “crime of the century” from their Lower East Side apartment. They were convicted of an espionage conspiracy for stealing atom bomb secrets for the Soviets, and were executed by electric chair in 1953. (Mrs. Rosenberg’s defenders, among them her two sons, say she was innocent and should be exonerated.)

• Elizabeth Bentley ran a Soviet spy ring out of her Barrow Street apartment in Greenwich Village, before becoming a double agent in 1945.

• Rudolf I. Abel, a Soviet spy who posed as an artist, rented an apartment and an artist studio in Brooklyn. A newsboy from the borough and a hollow nickel led to his arrest in 1957.

Even after the Cold War ended, the spying continued.

• In 2010, 10 Russian sleeper agents pleaded guilty to conspiracy before a federal judge in Manhattan and were sent out of the country as part of a swap. Their story inspired the television show “The Americans.”