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Vladimir Putin's spies used Cristiano Ronaldo's YouTube videos to send coded messages to Moscow.
The incredible revelation came to light when a seemingly regular couple was jailed after being found guilty in Germany of spying for Russia.
To their neighbors in the city of Marburg, an hour north of Frankfurt in western Germany, Andreas and Heidrun Anschlag appeared to be a normal married couple.
They had Austrian passports, which turned out to be fake, and claimed to be citizens of the neighboring nation of South American origin.
Andreas worked as a mechanical engineer, while Heidrun took care of the house and their daughter, who had no idea of her parents' true identities.
Barring long phone calls in the garden during the winter, a German journalist Mika Beuster said that "there was nothing that would distinguish them from any other family in the city."
But for 23 years, they were paid £80,000 a year by Russia to spy on the West - starting before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
Mr. and Mrs. Anschlag - whose real names are unknown - passed thousands of secrets to the Soviet Union and Russia, including from the EU, NATO and the UN.
They were helped by a collaborator at the Dutch Foreign Ministry, who sent monthly documents to be collected from so-called dead letter boxes, while USBs were left in the dens for them to retrieve.
The couple used radio and satellites to communicate with Moscow's Foreign Intelligence Service, the SVR.
But the rise of the internet gave 'Pit' and 'Tina' a new way to send messages to their spymasters.
The Anschlags created a YouTube profile with the username @Aplenkuh1 - which translates as "alpine cow 1" - in early 2011, with the Kremlin opening an account for themselves shortly after called @crsitanofootballer.
According to former BBC Security correspondent Gordon Corera, in his book "The Russians Among Us," the comments section of videos of then-Real Madrid hero Ronaldo playing football was a chosen forum for communication.
Corera writes: “The YouTube platform created another new way of communicating. “The couple and SVR created accounts a few months apart in early 2011, which commented on videos, mainly about footballer Cristiano Ronaldo.
"They wrote: 'It's a very beautiful video and the song is also very good.
"This was responded to by the SVR account called crsitanofootballer, saying: 'He runs and plays like the devil.'
"This, German investigators believe, was a means of communication hiding in plain sight amidst all the noise on the world's largest video platform."
"The comments included a sequence of punctuation marks that could be converted into numbers, which would then refer to a pre-agreed message."
The Anschlags were tracked by special intelligence forces to their apartment. It is understood the raid took place as Heidrun was receiving a coded message via a transmitter in their studio when the authorities burst in, catching them by surprise.
Heidrun fell from the chair in shock and pulled the connection cable.
The couple were sentenced in July 2013 - Andreas to six and a half years in prison, Heidrun to five and a half years - while the Dutch official to 12 years.
However, in late 2015, the two spies were released from prison and deported to Russia. /Adapted from The Sun/
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