The story isn't bogus, it's just blown out of proportion. That's unfortunately how most news articles work, especially ones related to crime. The ironic part is that this article is just as much "bogus" with the assumptions it's making.
If the story is espionage, but it isn't actually espionage then the story is bogus, flimflam, propaganda. Made to make you believe, i mean look, we asked all these experts too. And you are not an expert on this, so better believe us.
I thought the point of espionage is complete plausible deniability. For all you know it could be part of a bigger (psy)op to see what "lights up" when people go about sharing analyzing, critiquing this _news_..
Don't be so quick to judge -- I _think_ it could all be BS too. eg: getting hooked into ufo's and alien conspiracies as a kid until Mick West came along with real pragmatic analysis.
By that measure, all stories are bogus. Even things like how a story is framed (NLP scoring for positive vs negative sentiment) would be a made up part of the story since the evidence and facts reported typically do not provide explicit evidence for whether an event should be viewed and positive or negative. This sentiment is created and added by the reporter.
