Even as a grade-school child I was aware of the surveillance and the need for caution. I remember the stricken looks on my parents' faces when I once blurted out the code to their locked briefcase; that was when I realized that the walls had ears.

Espionage was a deadly serious game back then, and suspicions and tensions ran high. We worried about the fates of the Russians we interacted with, and we knew that some suffered consequences for associating with us. Westerners faced dangers too; diplomats and reporters could be expelled, or worse, if they ran afoul of the dreaded KGB.

In the 1980s, foreigners were kept strictly segregated from Russians. We lived in walled and guarded compounds, drove in specially marked cars, shopped in hard-currency stores, and attended foreign schools.

Even so, there was a string of scandals in the 80s that caused both the Americans and Soviets to increase their vigilance. Clayton Lonetree, a Marine Corps security guard, was seduced by a comely Russian agent and convicted in 1987 of spying against the United States. Aldrich Ames, who was convicted of spying for Russia in 1994, was found to have compromised several U.S. assets over the years. Construction of the U.S. embassy in Moscow was halted in 1985 after the building was found to be riddled with listening devices.

Our family received a scare when a fellow American journalist was arrested by the KGB in 1986 and accused of espionage, apparently in retaliation for the arrest of a Soviet UN diplomat in New York City. The reporter was eventually allowed to leave the country, but not before the Soviet authorities darkly reminded us all that the punishment for spying was death.

My father managed the challenges and we stayed on in Moscow to witness the short-lived regimes of Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko after Brezhnev's death in 1982, the interlude of glasnost and perestroika after Mikhail Gorbachev took over in 1985, and the exhilarating but lawless period in the early 1990s under Boris Yeltsin.

Today, with the Soviet Union long collapsed and the Communist regime long gone, the cloak-and-dagger stories seem best relegated to Washington's Spy Museum. Indeed, Fogle's case—almost too bizarre to be believed—seems to be the stuff of contemporary television shows like The Americans, which depicts KGB spies living in U.S. suburbs in the late 80s.

The expulsion of Fogle and other recent cases—such as the American unveiling of Russian spy Anna Chapman and nine other embedded agents in 2010—remind us that the spy game is alive and well. And also that the United States and Russia—though not enemies—are not yet friends.