Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  What were illegals for? The simplest answer is that they were there to do the things that other spies could not. Konon Molody was used to run spies where it was feared that KGB officers under diplomatic cover might be spotted. Other illegals were used to gather specific types of intelligence—for instance, by being trained scientists who could infiltrate biological research establishments or analyze technical data from agents there. Others were deployed purely in case of war. If conflict did break out, then diplomatic relations would be cut and these illegals would take over the running of agents from embassy spies. Some sleepers—also called konservy, or “preserves”—were there purely to carry out acts of sabotage in the event of war. The scale of Soviet and later Russian investment can only be understood when you realize that some illegals were trained for years and then spent decades in their target countries and yet were never called on to do anything operationally. They were a sign that Moscow played the long game when it came to spying. But other illegals—like Bezrukov and Vavilova—were not “sleepers” in the sense that they were dormant, waiting to be activated. Rather, from the beginning of their deployment they were to be engaged in starting to work their way into Western society with the purpose of gathering intelligence.

  An illegal could get deep into their opponent’s society in a way that a legal spy could not. That allowed you to understand your adversary and also meet people who would not engage with a Russian. Doing this required an actor’s talent, Bezrukov would later say. But an actor turns on his character for a performance and then returns to his normal self. That is not an option for an illegal. You had to become someone else—and never let that mask slip—and yet never lose your real self. Isolation was a constant worry. The illegal trainees were carefully observed, including by psychologists, to see if they would crack under the stress or if they could hold their cover. This was different from worrying if a secret agent would break under interrogation and torture. The stress instead would come from decades living in a foreign land. One person described the challenge as similar to training a flight crew of cosmonauts who were going to go out to space. The bonds between those out on a mission and those supervising them back home needed to be strong. A traitor among such a tight circle was almost unthinkable because of what it would mean. What Bezrukov could not have known was that at the very moment he was being trained in Moscow, the man whose fate would eventually determine his was undergoing his own training. A veteran of the Afghan war, Alexander Poteyev had been selected to attend the Red Banner Institute in Moscow—preparation to become a KGB intelligence officer.

  Learning the language of their target countries took up the majority of Bezrukov and Vavilova’s day. They had teachers who had lived in the West but were also given videocassettes of films whose dialogue they would copy and learn. They had to push their own language back in their minds so that the first word they reached for was in their new tongues of English and French, even if they swore. It was not just language but lifestyle. You had to wear the clothes, eat the food, smoke the cigarettes, and even use the razor blades of the target country. “We trained authentic Americans and Englishmen on Soviet territory,” explained one head of the KGB. “Habits of how to fill out forms in a London post office; how to pay for an apartment in New York.” You had to listen to the radio, watch the TV, and read the newspapers while instructors—often defectors—would test you. When one illegal returned to Moscow, his boss spotted him at the airport in a restaurant, slowly eating his dinner with a knife and fork like a “prim Englishman”—even smoking a pipe as if he were back in England. Vavilova had to learn tiny details that might give you away—for instance, in America when you counted with your fingers you did not bend them like you did in Russia. She would also have to learn what she called the “peculiar American optimism,” which meant “keeping your face smiling.” No more dour Russian looks for her.

  There is one fear that haunts Moscow Center. Could those undercover Russians take to their new lives a little too much and literally go native? During training, illegals were tested with dummy missions. They would be tasked with meeting an agent, but the real purpose was for the agent to report back on the prospective illegal. In some cases illegals were even given a truth drug. Bezrukov’s final test involved being given an attaché case with a false bottom containing, he assumed, drugs to hand over to someone he was told was a crime boss. It was supposed to be a straight handoff, but when he met the recipient, they forced him into a car. The case was empty and Bezrukov was subject to interrogation—with a gun pointed at him—to see if he could cope with the unexpected.

  When the training was complete, Andrey Bezrukov was going to disappear. Before they were posted abroad in the late eighties, Bezrukov and Vavilov, now about to become Heathfield and Foley, like every illegal, had to swear an oath to the party, the homeland, and the Soviet people.

  There was always trepidation, their spymasters would recall, as an illegal was finally dispatched. It was like sending a child out into the world. Drozdov was something of a father figure to the illegals in these years and would personally check on their progress. But now it was time to let them go. Another head of the directorate compared the moment to taking someone you had just taught to swim and sending them far out to sea. You did not know if they would have the strength to cover the long distance that lay in front of them.

  As the moment arrived, Bezrukov and Vavilova sat in front of an empty suitcase in their Moscow apartment. All the clothes they would travel in had to be carefully purchased outside of Russia so that nothing could give them away. They had cleared out every pocket so there was nothing like a coin or ticket stub. Into a box they placed the mementos of their old life that would be left behind—their love letters, Communist Party membership cards, and even their weddings rings. These would be handed over to the KGB for safekeeping. But there was one thing that Elena Vavilova held in her hand that she could not let go of—some pictures of her childhood. They were her last connection to Tomsk and to the life she was saying good-bye to. Those would come with her. It was a mistake that would come back to haunt her.

  What was the most difficult emotional experience in departing for a new life? The farewells to parents were hard (there was a cover story of going to Australia). But the real fear was never returning. “There was a possibility we would never come back. We even contemplated the possibility of dying there,” Vavilova later said. “Strangers in a strange land, under alias.” Bezrukov was haunted by the thought of the Canadian cemetery his false identity had been born in and the fear he might be buried far away from Mother Russia. The tombstone would simply read “Donald Heathfield.” If you were an illegal, even your death would be a lie. That was the life the young couple had committed to as they set out.

  3

  Strangers in a Strange land

  THE MONUMENT WAS at a picturesque site in Canada, although neither the man nor the woman who met each other there will say precisely where it was. The pair were playing at being tourists and strangers. The woman walked down the steps. She stopped for a moment looking for something in her handbag. The man happened to be standing in front of her. In these situations, a camera could be your best weapon. “Good morning. May I take your picture? You look so good in the sunlight,” the man said. Yes, she replied, and they began to talk. It seemed like a chance encounter but, in reality, it was the opening scene in a movie whose script had already been written. As their legend would have it, this was where the pair’s romance began. But the truth was they were not strangers. Rather they were already a married couple. The encounter at the monument was the cover story for where and how Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley first met and how their relationship began.

  THE PAIR HAD arrived separately in Canada in 1987, the Cold War still under way. There was excitement at the chance to prove themselves but also fear. The initial journey to a target country was a moment of high risk. There had to be no chance you could be traced back to Russia. So a journey might go first to Eastern Europe, and t
hen to Cyprus, to the Middle East, to Asia, and finally to Canada, at each stage a different set of documents used and then discarded. For Ann Foley, the final entry into Canada was the moment of greatest fear. “You also have to keep your emotions in check, keep calm, not show you are flustered or afraid,” she later recalled. There should be no sudden movements or looking around. But she had nothing to worry about. The Canadian authorities still do not know what identity the pair arrived under or even the date they came into the country. Once the disposable identities had been tossed away, the illegals switched to their new settled identities. First they had to meet and then melt into their target society. Canada was a long-established stepping-off point (the “host” country in the center’s terminology) to prepare to reach the “target country.” At least four of the eleven ghosts who would be the target of the 2010 arrests would have some kind of Canadian documentation. Canada was the ideal launching pad for illegals into America. The culture and language allowed an illegal to acclimatize and build up their identity while border and document checks were largely ineffective. “Canada is a lot like the US, only colder and with fewer people,” a KGB officer explained to one illegal in the 1970s.

  Heathfield and Foley’s mission was long-term penetration of the “main enemy.” But what is staggering is that they would spend more than a decade building up their cover before they actually went to live in the United States. That was how long Moscow Center was willing to wait. There was occasionally contact with Moscow Center as orders and money were sent, but their main job was to forget Russia and immerse themselves in Canada. Vavilova would observe other young women whom she saw on the street or met and then try to copy their gestures or their style of conversation. A job was vital partly as it started you on a career that would lead to contacts but also because you needed to explain where your money came from. Some illegals started a business (with money from Moscow); Heathfield had little help though. “I had to get an education again, look for work, create a business . . . without anyone’s help and with minimal resources,” he later said. In Montreal, Foley enrolled in a course at the Computer Institute of Canada and took a job in accounting at a garment factory. Heathfield worked in accounts at a Honda dealership. It just about covered the bills. They were tough years with long hours, the hard graft of being an illegal. They moved to Toronto and on June 27, 1990, they had their first son, Timothy.

  “Every undercover agents’ family have to decide, whether to have children at all,” Foley would later say. “This is a difficult decision to take.” You were bringing a child into the world whose family was living a lie. This was a heavy responsibility and some illegals decided against it. “We carefully weighed this, of course, discussed a lot,” she later said, acknowledging that “our leaders also had concerns.” But it was something the couple had always wanted. They also knew that from the outside, they would look more “normal” if they had children. Even the act of childbirth has risks. In the famous drama about illegals, Seventeen Moments of Spring, an illegal gives away her identity by crying out in pain while giving birth. The problem was she had done it in Russian. When it came to her time, Vavilova as Ann Foley took extensive precautions, attending prenatal classes to learn how best to control herself. She refused anesthetics to keep a clear mind and made sure her husband was present in case anything went wrong.

  The summer after the birth of their first child, the couple watched the coup in Moscow and then the collapse of the Soviet Union. The regime they had sworn an oath to was gone. Suddenly, they were on their own. But where some illegals may have given up, Heathfield and Foley did not. It was a “painful period,” Heathfield later acknowledged. “We could not receive support from the Center. We had to fend for our ourselves and cover all our expenses,” recalled Foley. A sense of patriotism endured even as the ideology they had sworn an oath to vanished. But there was also a sense of jeopardy, the knowledge that chaos in Russia risked their exposure. The end of the Soviet Union did not mean the end of the illegals or the desire of its intelligence services to spy on the West, though. Far from it. It was soon clear that the game went on.

  A YOUNG COUPLE approached the immigration officer in Helsinki airport on April 23, 1992, and showed their British passports. The man’s name was James Tristan Peatfield, from Surrey. She was Anna Marie Nemeth, from Wembley. But the immigration officer was suspicious. They seemed nervous. They had just got off a flight from Moscow but only had hand luggage and did not speak very good English. Who had won the British general election a few days earlier? They did not know. When their bag was searched, around $30,000 in cash was found inside an old shirt as well as a shortwave radio. Nemeth had some story about having been in Canada and working in an advertising agency. That was news to the real Anna Nemeth, who worked at a suburban Sainsbury’s supermarket and was left bewildered when police arrived at her door. She had visited Hungary four years earlier, when her passport details must have been copied. She had never met the real Mr. Peatfield, who was from Coulsdon in Surrey. The couple at the airport next offered a cover story that they were trying to emigrate illegally and had purchased passports on the black market with money from selling women’s underwear. Having such a cover story at the ready—usually involving some murky criminality—is standard practice for an emergency situation. The British intelligence officers who interrogated them in Helsinki had some hope that the woman might admit the truth, but she never did. The pair were deported to Moscow. They were illegals who had used the British identities of “live doubles” on a training mission and their failure was subject to a detailed review back in Directorate S. What it told the West was that the flow of illegals had not halted despite the end of the KGB.

  The end of the Cold War had not been a moment to relax for Directorate S. Rather it was a time to double down. The world was fluid and uncertain and that meant intelligence was more important than ever. In the first few months after the coup, even while the future of the whole KGB was uncertain, a decision was taken to increase the focus on illegals. “The world is not as safe as some people present it to be,” Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Chief Directorate, explained soon after he retired. “So I think it would be a very safe measure and a good precaution to strengthen the illegal branch.”

  The emphasis on illegals was part of a traumatic shift by the new SVR. In the early 1990s it was forced to cut its overseas network of officers operating under diplomatic cover by a third. The fact that relations with the West were improving offered new opportunities, though. In the Cold War, it was hard for Russians to get visas to the West. Now that commercial ties were growing, spies could be placed under cover in business ventures. And the openness also offered the chance to dispatch more illegals. “While favourable circumstances exist it is essential to utilize the repose to deploy to the West as many illegals as possible and to cultivate and recruit more special agents,” one member of the directorate, Alexander Kouzminov, later explained. It was almost as if, as everything else crumbled, the illegals became even more important. But they were about to be dealt a serious blow.

  DRESSED IN SHABBY clothes, a Russian knocked on the door of the American embassy in one of the Baltic states in March 1992. He was turned away disappointed, not once but twice. The Americans seem to have been nervous that the elderly man claiming he used to work for the KGB may have been a test of their new, more friendly relationship with Moscow. So the next stop for the Russian was the British embassy in Riga, Latvia, where he explained to a female diplomat that he had worked in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate and had access to top secret material. The Russian pulled open his bag. Inside were spicy sausages, bread, and dirty clothes. But he also pulled out some handwritten notes. These, he explained, were the names of illegals operating in the West—both their real identities and their cover names. The British diplomat immediately called MI6. At the time, the British Secret Service was based at Century House in Lambeth, a grubby, twenty-story tower block. It was a gloomy place that reeked of the past. “Are you s
till here?” officials from the rest of government would sometimes joke with its chief, Colin McColl, when they saw him. The Cold War was over and people were asking what exactly spies were for. But the team that dealt with Russia, and which sat on the thirteenth floor with a panoramic view of the nearby Oval cricket ground, had no intention of stopping even though their old adversary was on the back foot. The Russian defector in Riga, they soon learned, was a prize of the highest order. Vasili Mitrokhin was a former KGB archivist who now wanted to inflict as much damage as he could on his former employers. He had secretly copied out and then buried large chunks of the KGB’s operational history in the garden of his dacha.

  MI6 organized Mitrokhin’s exfiltration via boat on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, while a young officer dug up his files so they could be removed in six large trunks. Three thousand five hundred counterintelligence reports would be sent to thirty-six countries. The US file alone consisted of eight hundred pages. The CIA counterintelligence chief rued the fact he had to travel to London cap in hand for material that could have been his. The FBI, meanwhile, said it was “the most detailed and extensive pool” of intelligence about enemy spies they had ever received. It led directly to a number of illegals, one of them a KGB man living on the American East Coast under the name Jack Barsky. He was put under surveillance by the FBI, who overheard him confessing who he really was to his wife. Disillusioned, he had actually told the KGB back in 1988 that he had been dying of AIDS so that he could give up spying and bring up his child.