Russian Spies--Victims of Downsizing?

I've been loosely following the story of Russian spies deported from the US. Some have lived here so long and under such deep cover that they have grown children--US citizens--who didn't even know their parents were spies.

I keep trying to imagine what it would be like to live in a foreign country for years, work at a normal job, raise a family--all the while waiting for the call to come alive and do your clandestine duty for the motherland. I have to believe that's the kind of operatives these spies were, moles who wait for a command to go out and destroy a predetermined target. Because, if they were the kind put in place to provide ongoing information, they had to have been doing a terrible job. None of them appeared to have jobs that would afford them any more access to top secret information than I possess. And believe me--I certainly don't have access to anything that could be remotely considered secret.

What I think probably happened was that these people came to the US, burrowed down into the fabric of American life, and then--Boom!--the cold war ended. All of a sudden, there wasn't nearly as much call for spying as there had been. But, what are you going to do? Leave your nicely feathered US nest to go home to Russia and try to make a life in the chaos that reigned over there as Communism fell and near-anarchy rose? My bet is that these people just quietly kept on with their lives and waited for a call they knew wasn't likely to come. It finally did come, though. It's just that the slightly accented voice on the other end of the line said, "You're being traded," rather than, "Carry out your mission of destruction silently and swiftly." What a shock that must have been!