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It reads like the plot of a Cold War-era John le Carré novel set in the Bay Area: Russian spies roaming Pacific Heights and one standing on the shores of Stinson Beach, armed with a small device he may have used to map the country’s fiber-optic cables.

But according to a Foreign Policy magazine article published this month, the Russian Consulate on Green Street in the city’s Cow Hollow neighborhood was the epicenter of Russian espionage for the Western Hemisphere.

In the article—headlined “The Secret History of the Russian Consulate in San Francisco”—freelance journalist Zach Dorfman delves into the closing in August of the Kremlin’s outpost just steps from the Presidio

Dorfman, who relies heavily on anonymous sources in the intelligence community, reports that while news media focused on the smoke emanating from the consulate’s chimney, the real red flag was the “the motley array of antennas and satellites and electronic transmittal devices dotting the rooftop” of the stately brick building.

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The story details an elaborate possible plot by Russian officials to map places in the United States where data was being transferred through fiber-optic cables.

Dorfman describes strange activity: in one case, sources told him, Russian intelligence officers idled at a gas station but bought no gas. One passenger got out and circled a tree several times. Others reportedly idled in wheat fields.

Intelligence officials connected the strange behavior to Russian aircraft flight paths—and became concerned that Russian spies have been using airplanes to act as “a kind of cell tower” to receive and transmit data.

Why was San Francisco the center of all this espionage? Dorfman theorizes that it’s due to the city’s proximity to Silicon Valley, large research institutions, and nearby defense contractors.

Despite the shuttering of the consulate, Dorfman’s sources say Russian spying in the Bay Area is unlikely to entirely stop.

“The great game is upon us again,” one former intelligence official told Dorfman. “San Francisco has always been a focal point for Russian interests. The work won’t stop.”

The Trump administration ordered the closure of the consulate on Aug. 31, a few weeks after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered the reduction of U.S. personnel in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in response to sanctions passed by Congress.

Then, on Sept. 1, a mysterious plume of smoke was seen wafting from a chimney of the consulate, leading some to speculate that top secret documents were being destroyed. The smoke prompted the Bay Area Quality Management District to send a notice of violation to the Russians for illegal burning.

“It is highly likely, sources told me, that the consulate’s closure was linked to U.S. intelligence officials definitively proving long-held suspicions about the objectives of these Russian activities — or that officials could simply no longer countenance these extraordinarily aggressive intelligence-collection efforts and seized on the opportunity to disrupt them after Putin’s latest diplomatic salvo,” Dorfman wrote.

“What seems clear is that when it came to Russian spying, San Francisco was at the very forefront of innovation.”

Read the full Foreign Policy piece here.