Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  A few weeks after Putin became prime minister, the FSB burst into the apartment of a Russian scientist named Igor Sutyagin. The trail led back to a conference in Birmingham University on British-Russian relations the previous year. The professor organizing the event had received a fax from Alternative Futures, a London-based political risk consultancy, asking if they could send someone to attend. Three days later the professor received a telephone call asking for a Russian researcher to be invited. The researcher was Sutyagin. Born in 1965, he had studied physics at Moscow State University and ended up working at the US-Canada Institute, a think tank, as an expert on nuclear weapons and arms control. At the conference, the professor thought Sutyagin seemed pleasant but low-key. “He was small, slight and mild-mannered but aggressive in argument as academics tend to be.” But the man from Alternative Futures, who went by the name of Sean Kidd, was different. “Mr. Kidd was a bit of a flashy dresser who drove a sports car. He didn’t talk much but he took a lot of notes,” the professor recalled.

  A year and a half later, Sutyagin was arrested. It was alleged that in Birmingham and then during a visit to London he was recruited by US military intelligence. The initial charges were so vague that a regional court said they were “impossible to understand.” But the case was simply returned to the FSB to do better next time. Sutyagin was accused of having met with Alternative Futures in the United Kingdom, Belgium, Italy, Poland, and Hungary and having passed on information about, among other things, air-to-air missiles, the MiG-29 fighter jet, and Russia’s strategic nuclear forces. The list sounded sensitive. But there was a problem. Sutyagin did not have access to any secrets. He was a researcher in a think tank. Sutyagin was adamant: he was no spy. He did not have a security clearance and had only passed information that was publicly available, believing it was for a business consultancy. He explained that a report on an early warning system was based on information in the Washington Post. Another on the creation of new military units was from public statements by Defense Ministry officials.

  What was Alternative Futures? Sean Kidd had told Sutyagin it was helping businesses in the West understand the investment climate in Russia and would pay $1,000 a month for “exclusive” information. That was serious money since Sutyagin was only paid about $100 a month by the institute. Russian investigative journalists found Alternative Futures had vanished without a trace. “I wish these people would just come and tell their story,” the head of Sutyagin’s institute said of the company. “It sounds like something from John Le Carré. Are they just going to wash their hands of it and see a young man destroyed?”

  The FSB was right that Alternative Futures was a front for Western intelligence but was wrong about whom for. It would later emerge that Britain’s MI6 rather than US military intelligence was behind it. Western spies would often try to exploit the knowledge that in the hard-up Russia of the 1990s, foreign money was sometimes what allowed researchers to feed their families. Sutyagin always said he did not realize what was happening and there is no evidence he became a spy.

  On April 7, 2004, he was found guilty. Sentenced to fifteen years, Sutyagin disappeared on a grim tour of the Russian penal colony system, ending up in the northern city of Arkhangelsk. Sutyagin’s case became a cause célèbre for human rights groups who campaigned for his release, taking it up as an example of an increasingly authoritarian state criminalizing contact with foreigners. In MI6, there was a sense of guilt over a man languishing in a prison cell.

  Two days after Sutyagin was pronounced guilty, a high-ranking Russian spy spoke anonymously to the media. The story’s headline was “Spy Case Shows That Russia Is Recovering—Secret Service Source.” The Russian security state believed that everything had been for sale in the Russia of the 1990s. Now a message was being sent. Times were changing. It put Sutyagin’s case into a wider context of British and American spying. “Over the last five years foreign intelligence services have considerably stepped up their efforts,” the official said. They argued that the CIA’s priority had been political interference rather than just gathering information. “The CIA had the task of controlling political events in Russia and directing those processes into a route desirable for Washington,” the source said. This was the new mantra—foreign subversion, aided by domestic traitors. Russia’s spy-catchers like Zhomov were on the hunt—determined to erase the humiliation of the past. Their reach would extend from the streets of Moscow all the way to the suburbs of America.

  Alexander Zaporozhsky had cashed in the $2 million he earned from the tip-off pointing to Aldrich Ames and then retired from the SVR, content that no one knew his secret. He moved to America and was resettled with the help of the CIA. A few neighbors in the Maryland suburbs were curious about the man with the thick accent who had moved into the million-dollar mansion in a gated community. His explanation that he worked in some kind of vague “import-export” business only added to the mystery. “My guess was he was in the porn business,” one neighbor said later. “How else can you make dough like that?” Like many of his former colleagues, he figured he could cash in on his connections and offer consultancy to those seeking to do business between America and Russia. He traveled to Europe and would occasionally drop in on former colleagues in Russian embassies.

  In 2000 he met two of his CIA handlers at a restaurant for one of their regular lunches. “I’m going back to Moscow for a visit,” he told them, explaining he had been invited back to some kind of reunion with old KGB friends. “That’s not a good idea,” they told him before spending the rest of lunch trying to dissuade him. He waggled his finger at them and said they were wrong, explaining he had already been back once to Moscow, in the summer of 1999, without any problems and he had been reassured by former colleagues that there would be no issues this time. He did not say which former colleagues had invited him, but the Americans later learned that among them was a woman in whom he had more than a passing interest. They again said no, you should not do this. Concern escalated up the agency. “He can’t do that,” Steve Kappes, the head of counterintelligence, said when told about the plan, leading him to go and see the Russian himself and explain it was too dangerous. Zaporozhsky was even told that CIA director George Tenet did not want him to go. But the strong-willed spy was now an American citizen and there was no way of stopping him. Zaporozhsky thought he was smarter than everyone else. He thought he could still play the game and win. And he suffered from the spies’ folly, the belief they will never get caught. “This is probably the last time I’m ever going to see you,” said one American as the Russian prepared to head back. As soon as Zaporozhsky got off the plane in Moscow in November 2000, the FSB was waiting. The handcuffs went straight on. He would be sentenced to eighteen years’ hard labor. It was a trap and the CIA’s old foe Sasha Zhomov had masterminded the operation.

  The reason the Americans had been so keen to dissuade Zaporozhsky from returning to Russia is that they knew there was another traitor who might compromise him. Robert Hanssen was responsible, in different ways, for the fate of two men in the 2010 spy swap. He had been able to search FBI computer systems and monitor investigations into spies. One search came back with information that he passed to the KGB in a dead drop. This had led them to Zaporozhsky and his arrest. Back in November 1987, Hanssen had passed another cable to Moscow. This one reported a meeting between a CIA and a KGB officer, another of the four swapped in Vienna. Jack Platt, known as “Cowboy” because of his boots and devil-may-care attitude, had been assigned by the CIA to target Soviet diplomats in Washington. He had struck up an unusual friendship with one of his targets—Gennady Vasilenko of the KGB. The pair met at a Harlem Globetrotters game and got along. Platt took the Russian hunting in the woods and got drunk with him over long lunches. This was not the first time a spy had told his bosses that he just needed one more boozy lunch to recruit his source. But neither recruited the other. After he left Washington, Vasilenko resurfaced in Guyana. Platt flew to meet him and cabled the results of their conversati
on back to the CIA, with the FBI copied in. Just days after that meeting, Hanssen handed over the cable to the KGB. Vasilenko had not told his bosses about all of his contacts and so was shipped back to Moscow on a freighter. Since there was no proof he was working for the Americans, he was eventually released.

  The hunt for a mole had continued in Washington in the late 1990s after the arrest of Aldrich Ames. The FBI zeroed in on a CIA officer (who was the agency’s leading expert on illegals). His home was searched, his phone tapped, his daughter (a CIA employee) was told her dad might be a traitor. He was not. The FBI also came up with a plan that involved identifying Russians who might know the identity of the mole and “cold-pitching” them—walking up to them, often when they were traveling abroad, and offering them a million dollars. Their list had two hundred names.

  In 1999, Vasilenko ran into a retired former KGB colleague in Moscow who was in trouble with the Russian mafia and needed money. Vasilenko introduced him to Platt, who in turn passed on the name to the FBI team hunting the mole. They invited him for a spurious meeting with a potential business partner in New York. Vasilenko signed documents for the man’s travel. In April 2000, number 28 of the FBI’s million-dollar pitches hit the jackpot. The former KGB man revealed he had hard evidence regarding the American traitor. Hanssen had taken one smart precaution. He had never told his Russian handlers his real name. He had left documents and instructions in dead drops and picked up the money in return. The KGB had never liked running an agent whose identity they did not know so they had collected evidence, including a plastic bag he had used at one of the dead drops and the recording of a telephone conversation between the mole and a KGB officer. The former KGB officer had stolen the file containing this physical evidence and kept it at his mother’s house as insurance for a rainy day. Now he cashed it in for a $7 million payoff. When they played the tape recording, FBI agents expected to hear the voice of the CIA officer they were convinced was the traitor but instead listened in shock as they realized it was their own colleague Robert Hanssen. One agent threw his headphones against the wall.

  Hanssen had handed over everything, from the names of agents to details of hugely expensive technical surveillance programs. This included Operation Monopoly. A house had been purchased in Washington, DC, to allow a tunnel to be built under the Soviet embassy in Washington to facilitate eavesdropping. The total estimated cost of Hanssen’s betrayal was in the tens of billions of dollars. He had even given the KGB the inside track on how the FBI tried to catch them on American soil. “Hanssen had destroyed the nation’s defenses against Russian espionage,” writes Mike Sulick of the CIA. “With knowledge of the FBI’s physical and technical surveillance, the Russians could operate unhindered on American soil.” But fortunately, he had not known everything. He did not know that the FBI had recruited Poteyev in New York the previous year. On February 18, 2001, Hanssen was arrested as he went to a drop in the woods. Ames and Hanssen, along with two other spies, explain most of the compromises of the 1980s and 1990s. But not all. Multiple CIA and FBI officers say they continue to believe there was at least one other mole who operated during that time and who has never been unmasked.

  Inside the FSB there was fury at the loss of a prized source who had spied for them for decades. They wanted revenge. And the man tasked with exacting it was, once again, Sasha Zhomov. In 2003, Milt Bearden, now retired from the CIA, sat across a table from Zhomov. “I can still see Zhomov’s steel-gray eyes darken as we sat across from each other in Moscow, the Russian counterintelligence officer fingering a delicate silver crucifix on a chain around his neck and promising me that he would not rest until he had found the traitors in his midst,” Bearden wrote later. The man who had sold the file was out of reach, but Zhomov would find others to hold responsible. In 2005, Vasilenko was arrested again. His signature had been on the travel documents of the man who had given Hanssen away. He was interrogated personally by Zhomov, although the FSB officer would leave the rough stuff to others. In prison Vasilenko met his old KGB colleague Zaporozshky. One had foolishly left America. The other now felt sold out by his friend over there. Together, they faced years of hard labor. The Russians were no longer on the back foot. Under Putin, they were determined to hit back after the disastrous nineties. And that meant increasing their focus on catching those spying within Russia while also driving forward the work of their own spies operating in the West.

  10

  Targeting

  ON DECEMBER 3, 2004, Donald Heathfield composed a secret message for his superiors at Moscow Center. Their deep-cover spy was beginning to make inroads in his primary mission. He told the SVR that he had just attended a seminar. He had managed to strike up a conversation with a serving official at the Department of Energy who worked for a US government research facility that carried out strategic planning for nuclear weapons development. Heathfield reported that he had conversations with the official about research programs on small-yield, high-penetration nuclear warheads (a type of so-called bunker buster). This was promising. Soon after, in September 2005, he would compose another message. Now he had “established contact” with a former high-ranking US national security official. The primary mission of the SVR is to recruit agents who can provide useful information. And one of the jobs of the American-based illegals was to scout these targets.

  Heathfield’s work was superb cover. With multiple degrees, including from Harvard, the days of selling diapers were now long gone. He first worked for Global Partners Inc., a business development consultancy that offered strategic planning and that opened doors in business and government. Colleagues remember a well-organized, hard worker. His starting salary was roughly $85,000—paying the bills was getting easier. He would claim his clients included major companies like General Electric, Ericsson, Motorola, Microsoft, and T-Mobile, although it is not entirely clear how far this really stacked up. But he was also building a wider network of contacts.

  “He’d always hang around and always want to meet people,” says William Halal, a professor at George Washington University who got to know Heathfield after he started to turn up at events. The spy began to hang around with a crowd who shared an interest in strategy, including those at think tanks, universities, and federal agencies. Halal was an expert on technological change and worked with companies but also government agencies, including the Pentagon, to predict the impact of emerging technologies. “He wanted to collaborate—that’s what drew me in,” Halal recalls, and the two began to cooperate. “He wasn’t fooling around. That’s why he carried it off so well.” Others recall Heathfield’s interest in how America would adapt to long-term changes in energy supply—an issue of major interest for Russia, whose economy depends on oil and gas exports.

  In 2006, Heathfield struck out and founded his own company, called Future Map. It claimed to have offices not just in Cambridge but also Paris and Singapore. It offered something rather nebulous—help for companies to plan for future challenges. He shared the trait of many management consultants with a preference for vague business-speak, which made it hard to pin down exactly what he meant. Along with talk about “developing strategic proactivity,” he offered a five-thousand-dollar software package to help CEOs keep track of long-term plans and spot possible surprises. “He was basically using what amounted to a calendar with a few bells and whistles,” an intern who was asked by Heathfield to help develop the software said. “It was a piece of junk.” But it was the perfect product to pitch to interesting people.

  Heathfield tried to market his software to government agencies, often through intermediaries. It was not just a sell-and-forget piece of software, but had the option of an ongoing relationship. He met an employee of STRATFOR, a private intelligence and forecasting company, five times to pitch to them. The company’s founder later said he feared if they had installed the software it would have secretly sent data to Moscow, but FBI officials do not believe there was anything hidden inside it (although perhaps that could have been added down the road
). FBI agents recall listening in to an endless number of Heathfield’s sales calls. He did not quite have the smooth patter of an American salesperson to close the deal, they felt. There was always something a little abrupt when it came to the final “are you going to buy this or what” (they speculated as to whether this was peculiarly Russian). They thought he was a little arrogant, but FBI agents also thought he was the “truest believer” of the illegals.

  The electronic messages the FBI intercepted would be the key to understanding what the illegals were up to. They made it clear that they “spent a great deal of time collecting information and passing it to Moscow Center,” according to the FBI. However, little of this has been made public. That is partly because these messages included the names of hundreds of Americans—each of them a potential target for Russian intelligence.

  “You have got to have more contacts. That was their mantra over the years,” one person who served as an illegal in the West recalls of his orders. Heathfield, like the other illegals, sent back hundreds of names of people they met. Each possible target was given a code name. Heathfield had met one person designated “Parrot.” “Your relationship with ‘Parrot’ looks very promising as a valid source of info from US power circles,” the SVR said. “To start working on him professionally we need all available details on his background, current position, habits, contacts, opportunities, etc.” Once this was sent back to Moscow they would research him carefully—this might involve looking for any personal “weaknesses” like debts or problematic relationships that could be exploited. But it could be something more mundane about his interests that would allow Heathfield to build a relationship and get close to him. These two initial steps—of identifying someone who might be a potential agent and then learning about them—are known in the trade as “spotting” and “assessing.”