Scenario: You're an ordinary American kid. You live with your parents and your sister in a New Jersey suburb, and attend the local elementary school. Your family is curiously nuclear: No grandparents, no aunts or uncles, no cousins. Just your parents, your sister and you, seemingly a typical suburban family. And then, one day, it all falls apart: The FBI raids your house, arrests your parents and drags them out in handcuffs. You and your sister are driven away by a family friend. And you learn that your parents actually aren't Americans at all; they are "illegals," deep cover Russian intelligence agents living in the country under false identities and spying on America. Your entire life has been a shining lie. And who knows what is going to happen to you?
That is pretty much non-fiction, by the way. It describes what happened to the daughters of a couple in Montclair, New Jersey, who claimed to be "Richard and Cynthia Murphy." According to the article I read in the USA Today, the kids probably had no idea about their parents' true identities. And ironically enough, if they were born here, then they're just as much American citizens as any Mexican anchor baby.
I don't feel any sympathy for the spies, but I do feel sorry for the kids. How horrible would it be to discover that everything you thought you knew about your family and yourself was a lie? It's like something out of Alfred Hitchcock or The Twilight Zone.
