Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  Intelligence agencies like the SVR build up vast libraries of files on individuals who might end up one day being of interest. Much of this material will not be “classified” but will be everything from university history to gossip to their favorite sports team. You never knew which detail might end up being useful. When that person needed to be approached, you might be able to drop into the conversation the name of your favorite team. Perhaps they should meet up for a beer before the game next month?

  One thing that the illegals were not normally supposed to do was the final pitch to someone to become a spy—the “recruitment.” Showing their hand as SVR officers was too risky. Most pitches do not work. And if an illegal pitches and fails and it gets reported, then all the investment in their cover is blown. The FBI sometimes saw the illegals champing at the bit. “I want to go after this guy,” they would be saying, but Moscow Center would say no. The SVR would frequently remind the illegals to remember the security rules that had been laid out. This included trying to keep the deep-cover illegals away from getting too close to anyone with a security clearance. If that person put down the illegal as a friend on their clearance form, then their cover might not stand up to an investigation.

  The illegals supplied material for other SVR officers to make a pitch—creating what are called “targeting packages.” In the long term, some of the leads they sent back to Moscow may have proven fruitful or may do so in the future. Intelligence recruitment is a long game that is played out over years and even decades, especially by the Russians. Perhaps some American will travel to Moscow in a few years’ time and a file will be pulled with a personal detail about their particular interest or vice that was collected by Donald Heathfield two decades earlier and that detail will allow the SVR to find just the right way of approaching and turning him or her. We may never know.

  How successful was Heathfield in talent spotting? In one message, Moscow Center told Heathfield: “Agree with you [sic] proposal to keep relations with ‘Cat’ [a former high-ranking US national security official he met in September 2005] but watch him.” That individual is thought to be Leon Fuerth, who had been national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore. Heathfield introduced himself after Fuerth gave a speech and went on to propose they become partners in a research project on long-range projections. Heathfield made a point of citing Fuerth multiple times in the introduction and body of his paper on improving decision making in national security. But Fuerth declined to get involved with Heathfield, who soon after gave up trying to communicate. The illegals did get close to government officials—at least one official was approached to confirm their identity by the FBI. But their success was limited. There was a reason for that. The FBI was watching closely.

  The FBI observed Heathfield report back on the contacts he cultivated. To their amusement, they could see times when he exaggerated his success (something spies through the ages have been guilty of). But a reason Heathfield may not have been as successful as he would have liked was that if the FBI did see him getting too close to someone, they would intervene. They will not say how often that happened, but it seems to have been on multiple occasions. It was not always a case of confronting someone with the truth that their new friend was a Russian spy, as that carried risks of their investigation leaking out. It could be easier to just make sure people’s paths did not cross. “If they get too close to someone we don’t want them to get too close to, we just move them,” explains FBI agent Derek Pieper. “Fundamentally that was our job. It was to make sure they never got access to classified information. It is constantly that balancing act. Are they getting too close—how do we stop them—what do we do—without blowing the case.” But their success in keeping the illegals away from classified material itself created a challenge for the FBI team. Colleagues in the bureau would ask if the illegals had recruited anyone with access to classified information. The answer would be no. So what’s the big deal, they would ask? Why spend so much time and resources on watching them? The team would have to explain that the threat was much longer term and subtle. What if the illegals spotted someone who could be recruited and then ten years down the line wound up working as a penetration agent inside the American intelligence community? After all, when Kim Philby was recruited as a young student fresh out of Cambridge, he had zero access to classified intelligence, but a decade and a half later he was the liaison between MI6 and the CIA and providing the most sensitive of secrets.

  The risk with the illegals was not that they would burrow into government or intelligence agencies themselves. Rather, it was that they would be able to recruit people who could do so in the long term. This was what made the generation known as the “great illegals” in the 1930s such a success. In Britain, they had talent-spotted a group of young men fresh out of Cambridge University because they had seen their potential. The “Cambridge Five” (although there may have been more than five and an Oxford ring as well) were directed to work their way into the heart of the British establishment—which they managed in the following years, getting into MI5, the Foreign Office, and, in the form of Kim Philby, the higher echelons of MI6. The goal of Moscow had always been to replicate this kind of success. “We believe the SVR illegals may well have hoped to do the same thing here,” said an FBI counterintelligence agent. “They identified colleagues, friends, and others who might be vulnerable targets, and it is possible they were seeking to co-opt people they encountered in the academic environment who might one day hold positions of power and influence.” This was the real danger posed by their work: that they might recruit a new generation of spies who could themselves access secrets. “It is ultimately the long game,” explains Maria Ricci. “It is not who you know today—it is what that person you know today becomes in ten years.”

  Boston, and especially Cambridge—home to Harvard—was an ideal location, full of thought leaders, policy makers, scientists, and politicians. Heathfield and Foley lived a good life with nice cars and foreign travel. They told neighbors they were French Canadian, although one—who happened to be a French teacher—found the accent a little odd. Ann looked after the kids when they were young. While the FBI found Donald to be quite stern, she struck them as a good mother, conscientious with her kids. There were barbecues and baseball on the weekend. As they grew older, she worked in real estate, latterly for a company called Redfin, based in Somerville. “She was nice, friendly, very normal. Isn’t that what they always say about the guys next door who turn out to be Russian spies?” her boss later said. The couple had a division of labor. Ann—at home more—would handle most of the communications back to Moscow, while Donald did the spying. The FBI would overhear the odd arguments over the timeliness of the sending of reports back, but she was capable of standing up for herself.

  FOR THEIR TWO children, Alex and Timothy, the only distinctive aspect of their upbringing was how international it was. Timothy had been born in June 1990 and spent his first five years in Toronto, then France, before coming to the United States. Their parents deliberately chose an international, bilingual English and French school for the boys. “We were trying to avoid making them typical Americans,” their mother later said. One thing their parents could not countenance was the idea that children in American schools had to give a pledge of allegiance every morning. Perhaps there were just too many echoes of the pledge that they had given to their motherland before they set out as illegals. There was also a desire to broaden their outlook. They understood that perhaps one day their boys might learn that their lives had been built on a lie and would have to adapt. “We tried to have as many opportunities as possible to see and compare different countries,” Heathfield later said. “It is obvious that living in another country, you cannot join the Russian values. But you can instill—if not love, because they do not know the country—then at least respect.” The children remember their father encouraging them to read, travel, and be interested in the world. “As a family we loved to travel and did so extensively when we could,” Alex la
ter recalled. They went to about forty countries. Their mother never cooked them borsch, a Russian dish, but she did once make them pelmeni, another dish from back home, and claimed it was Italian tortellini, a small deception. When Alex was struggling with math he was sent for extra lessons at a school founded by Russians. He began telling his parents how good Russians seemed to be at math. He had no idea that, at least in terms of his own ancestry if not upbringing, he was himself Russian. In the back of the parents’ minds there was always the question of what the boys would find out and when.

  BESIDES THEIR LONG-TERM goal of spotting possible agents, the illegals were also given specific intelligence-gathering directives from Moscow Center—so-called info tasks. In April 2006, an electronic message provided instructions for the coming two months. This included gathering information on US policy on an eclectic range of issues—from terrorist use of the internet to policy in Central Asia and US views of Russian foreign policy. Heathfield and Foley dutifully compiled responses. In May they sent a message about the arrival of Michael Hayden as the new CIA director. They also sent details about the upcoming 2008 presidential election. This information was described as having been received in a “private conversation” with a former legislative counsel in Congress who was now a member of an economics faculty at a university but who continued to have contacts within Congress and policy-making circles. Espionage was not like a crime in which you were hurting someone else, Heathfield would argue. Rather, it was a patriotic activity, a defensive exercise of gathering intelligence to help your country’s leaders make the right decisions. This, he would say, could almost be a “stabilizing factor” in international relations that allowed leaders to cut through propaganda and misinformation by seeing the true picture. Predicting US foreign policy toward Russia was one of their primary missions. “You have to foretell the intentions of the people who build up political plans,” Foley later said. “It is important to anticipate what decision will be taken and pass over this information in time for our country’s leadership to get ready for it.”

  Heathfield never thought of the Americans around him as enemies. He considered himself more like an undercover anthropologist on a mission to understand. If you behaved like James Bond, he said, you would survive half a day. If you thought there was some safe where all the secrets you needed were hidden and you just needed to break in, then you were wrong. The goal was more subtle than stealing secrets. “The highest class of intelligence is to understand what your opponent will be thinking about tomorrow, and not what he was thinking about yesterday,” he argued.

  Putin and those around him came from the secret world. That meant they valued secret information particularly highly. They often only believed a piece of information if it came from a secret source rather than something public. This was part of why the illegals were valued in Moscow. Even if their intelligence was not always revelatory, it was given extra weight because of how it had been obtained. One other important lesson for those trying to understand the Kremlin was how little Putin—who had barely traveled abroad apart from East Germany before he came to office—really understood the West and particularly America.

  Richard Murphy proved less successful in his mission than Heathfield. He had originally been the primary operative—the person who was supposed to go out and get a job and develop useful contacts while his wife supported. He was a computer technician and in the early 2000s got a job at the G-7 Group, which advised its clients on how government policy affected financial markets. It included influential figures like a former Federal Reserve vice chairman and fund-raisers for political parties. It was a good place to start building contacts but Murphy only lasted three years because he did not have the technical skills the firm required. His struggles as a spy soon became a source of tension for the couple.

  On September 23, 2004, a bug inside their Hoboken apartment picked up a conversation in which Cynthia lectured Richard. Sometimes a partner might lecture their spouse that they need to get a promotion or a pay raise, but she was telling him he needed to be a better spy and raise his game. The problem, she explained, was that he would not be able to get a job in the upper echelons of the US government, for instance in the State Department. This was because of their birth certificates. Any proper background check risked exposing the certificates as fake. So instead, she told him, he had to do more to approach people with access to places like the White House to gain indirect access. So far he was not getting close.

  Soon Cynthia made clear that since she did not think Richard was up to it, she was going to take over. So the couple swapped roles. She would go to work and do the intelligence gathering and he would look after the kids. It did not take long for it to become clear that Cynthia was the more capable spy. She had studied finance and international business at the Stern School at New York University. Her LinkedIn profile says she had worked since 1997 as a vice president at Morea Financial Services, which provided “comprehensive Financial Planning and Tax Accounting services for high net-worth individuals”—perfect cover to meet influential people. Later, between 2008 and 2010, she would study for an MBA at Columbia. This proved an even better hunting ground for her. She, along with Heathfield, would be the most successful of the deep-cover illegals.

  What is it like to sacrifice a normal life in order to be an illegal—for the adventure of being a spy—and then find out you are not very good at it, and your wife is more talented? Rather than being out meeting people and cultivating contacts, Murphy found himself stuck at home. This loss of purpose left Richard Murphy struggling and unhappy, the FBI thought as they watched. “I think Richard Murphy was clinically depressed,” says Alan Kohler. “He just sat on the couch and watched TV all day long and Cynthia was like screw this—we are here for a job—I’m going to do the job. So then she started doing it.” The FBI would sometimes hear them argue. Cynthia would call from work and ask if he could help with something—she was busy, could Richard pick up the kids? He would mutter something about being busy doing the vacuuming. “And then we would hear him watching The Sopranos,” said Pieper.

  Juan Lazaro was also having problems with the intelligence he was sending back. On September 10, 2002, he and Pelaez were overheard discussing Moscow’s unhappiness with Lazaro’s recent reporting. “They tell me that my information is of no value because I didn’t provide any source,” he complained despondently. “Put down any politician,” Pelaez says, apparently happy to pull the wool over the eyes of Moscow. It sounds like he then complains about his bosses not caring about the mission. “So . . . why do they have you? If they don’t care about the country . . . What do we have intelligence services for?” Pelaez replies.

  Lazaro’s career was on the wane and he retired in 2004. Like most people who have worked for the same organization for decades, he was due a pension. But unlike most retirees, this did not involve a trip to the local bank or welfare office. Instead he had to go to South America and carry out a brush contact once a year with a Line N officer from the Russian Foreign Intelligence service. This annual trip became his only operational act (one the FBI carefully monitored). On August 25, 2007, the FBI watched and videotaped a meeting in the same Peruvian park. He was seen meeting a man, later identified as a Russian embassy employee. They walked together and then sat on a bench. The Russian then placed a shopping bag into a plastic bag held by Lazaro. On his return, Lazaro spent eight thousand dollars on county and city taxes.

  It is telling that after retiring from three decades as an illegal, Lazaro continued to live in America. This was a man who had been given the mission of spying on the country. And yet, even though he was no longer an active spy, he decided to stay in the country rather than return home. He was not, it is thought, unique in doing that. Other illegals were also allowed to stay in the United States after a quarter of a century’s service during the Cold War, SVR officers would say. The only conclusion to draw from this is that they simply preferred life in America, especially as a retiree and especially if, like
Lazaro, they had put down family roots. This was always the lurking fear at the heart of the illegals program when it came to Western countries. Lazaro’s career was over and the era of the old Cold War family illegals was also slowly drawing to a close. Now a new breed of spies was on their way to the West. And they would look very different.

  11

  Enter Anna

  THE YOUNG RUSSIAN was hard to miss. She was wearing a long, flowing white dress when Alex Chapman saw her at a dance rave in London in the summer of 2001. The dress, bought for her school graduation, reached down to her ankles but did not hide her curves. Alex plucked up courage and went over to talk to her. “I’m sorry, but you’re the most gorgeous girl I’ve ever seen,” the tousle-haired, easygoing English boy said. She did not brush him off. Her name, she said, was Ana Kuschenko. She was nineteen and from Russia. Alex was twenty-one. He loved music and was working at a recording studio after leaving boarding school at sixteen. He could not believe his luck. The pair talked until seven the next morning. He was smitten. She would later claim it was love at first sight. This would have been a disappointment to Marcus Read, who had met her the previous summer in Africa. She had then called from Russia saying she wanted to see him and asking him to sign some papers to invite her over. He recalled they had gone straight to bed when she had arrived in the United Kingdom but now, six weeks later, she was hooking up with Alex Chapman.

  Ana was studying economics in Moscow. She had grown up in Volgograd—teachers remembered her as shy and well-behaved, largely looked after by her grandmother as her parents were abroad. She always wanted to be a businesswoman, they would later say. She was from the first generation of Russians for whom the Cold War was history. They could enjoy moving freely between Russia and the West. Ana rang Alex the day after the rave and they met up. She said she loved his accent. And the hair—a bit like Liam Gallagher from the rock band Oasis. The next day she flew back to Russia and there were tears. But Alex decided he would pursue her to Moscow. There were trips back and forth. On a British Airways flight to Moscow in January 2002 he would say they joined the mile-high club in the bathroom. He was totally infatuated and asked her to marry him. They tied the knot at a registry office in March 2002. He rented a dinner suit that sat loose on his skinny frame. She wore the same white dress she had worn the night they met, just over half a year earlier. Ana later denied that there were any “secret motives” for her marriage and said that it had always been love at first sight. But marrying a Briton or an American was quite literally a passport to the West for a young Russian woman. Now Ana had hers. Good-bye, Ana Kuschenko. Hello, Anna Chapman.