NEARLY TWO YEARS later, Sergei Skripal’s world came crashing down. When he had returned to Moscow from his posting in Spain, MI6 was faced with the same challenge as the Americans with Poteyev. Skripal was initially working in the GRU’s personnel department and his family life appeared settled, with his wife, Ludmilla; a son, Sasha; and a daughter, Yulia. It was too risky to meet MI6 officers in Moscow. Instead his wife delivered a book with secret writing to British intelligence in Spain on two occasions. In 1999 Skripal quit the GRU, saying he was fed up with corruption. He went to work in the private sector for the last commander of Soviet forces in Afghanistan and continued to sporadically supply information to MI6, now traveling in person to Spain and Turkey for meetings. But the hunt for spies in Moscow was intensifying.
In December 2004, FSB officers pounced on him just outside his apartment. He knew better than to struggle against the men half his age. His shoulder was wrenched from its socket and a hood placed over his head before he was bundled into the back of a blacked-out van and driven off. TV cameras were there to film it all. He was taken to Lefortovo prison in Moscow—a site with a dark history and home to political prisoners and those accused of spying. His trial was held largely in secret. He was only shown to the cameras at the very end, looking confused but unbowed, wearing a track suit in the colors of the Russian flag as if to make one last claim of patriotism. Russian intelligence sources briefed that the sentence of thirteen years was lenient since he had cooperated—although whether that is true or how far is unclear.
Conditions in the labor camp were tough, but Skripal had been a championship boxer in the Soviet army (leaving him with a slightly squashed nose). This meant that even though he was now more than fifty years old, he could take the blows from guards and deter some of the other inmates from giving him the treatment they often dished out to political prisoners. Eating prison slop, he would dream it was ice cream. The reason for his arrest, it later emerged, was thought to be information provided to the Russians by a Spanish intelligence officer who was aware of his original recruitment in Madrid. Senior MI6 officers went out to Spain to take part in the investigation. There was a despondency in the organization. When an agent is caught, there is both the personal regret for an individual to whom they had promised safety and professional regret that they had been outplayed, making others less likely to follow his path. But this was not the only exposure of British intelligence operations in Moscow.
The embarrassing incident featured a rock—about the size of a football—that was heavy enough that it required two hands to lift. Picking up a rock in a snowy Moscow park and carrying it off is not exactly the most inconspicuous activity for a British diplomat. Nor is kicking the same rock. But in January 2006, Russian TV broadcast surveillance footage of four Britons amid sensational claims about a “spy rock.” It was explained that an agent could walk past the rock and press a button on a handheld device kept in his pocket. That would transmit intelligence that would be stored in the rock until an MI6 officer later picked it up. It was the latest high-tech version of the classic dead drop, with the advantage that the agent did not even need to hide his material. “According to our experts, this device cost millions of pounds. It’s a miracle of technology,” an FSB spokesperson said. X-rays of the rock were shown on TV revealing its secret compartment along with footage of the alleged British spies (one of whom warily looks around as if suspecting a camera might be close and then slows down and glances at the rock as he passes by).
The revelations surrounding the rock were closely linked to a high-profile campaign. The TV documentary in which the footage was shown claimed that British spies were contacting and financially supporting Russian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Now a new law would crack down on them. An alliance of NGOs and foreign spies was portrayed as responsible for the so-called Color Revolutions—the “Rose Revolution” in Georgia in 2003 and “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine in 2004, in which pro-Russian leaders were removed from power. This, the Kremlin and the FSB thought, had been part of a plot. All the talk of promoting democracy—and the various groups involved in supporting its growth in Russia—was actually cover for subversion by Western intelligence. The conspiratorial worldview of those in power in Russia meant sometimes they connected dots and saw conspiracies and plots when there were just events. They were convinced that the guiding hand of Western “special services” (their term for intelligence services) was behind these events. The West was also edging NATO closer to what Russia defined as its “sphere of influence,” with talk of Georgia and Ukraine one day joining. The sense of paranoia in Russia was growing. The need for intelligence, like that supplied by the illegals to uncover the intentions of its adversaries, was more important than ever. And so was the need to stop Western spies stealing Russian secrets and plotting within their country.
In 2007, the head of the FSB, Nikolai Patrushev, said that in the previous four years more than 270 active officers and 70 agents of foreign intelligence services had been uncovered. “One should specially single out Britain, whose special organs not only conduct intelligence in all areas but also seek to influence the development of the domestic political situation in our country,” he explained when asked who was most active, citing the Skripal case. Foreign spies were doing more than just stealing secrets. “Giving themselves the credit for the disintegration of the USSR, they are now nurturing plans aimed at dismembering Russia,” Patrushev told journalists. Russian spies were convinced the West was stirring up rebellion in the Caucasus. For Poteyev, watching the arrest of Skripal and the intensifying spy fever under Putin and Zhomov would have created a sense of rising pressure for him. How long could he manage without making a mistake?
Russia’s spies were changing. In the 1990s, they would often talk nostalgically with their American and British counterparts about the Cold War. But by the mid-2000s, a new generation was taking over. They were colder and harder, more conscious of the humiliations of the past. One American recalls witnessing the tension at the end of a long vodka-drinking session after a liaison meeting. An older Russian officer reminisced wistfully about the good old days of the Cold War, when the two spy services went head-to-head. But a young FSB officer reacted angrily. The older officer’s generation was the one that lost the Cold War, he said bitterly. His generation was determined to restore Russian pride and would take the fight to their enemy.
14
The Controller
ON MARCH 31, 2002, Richard Murphy was letting off steam to the man opposite him. The pair were at a restaurant in Sunnyside, Queens, in New York. The two men met there once a year. It could have been two old friends catching up, one listening to the other about the struggles of middle-aged life. Murphy was unhappy with the way his work was going, his career was not progressing as he had hoped, his wife was on his back, and he was short of cash. His dining partner, a few years older with a lean face, eventually ran out of patience. “Well, I’m so happy I’m not your handler,” he said to Murphy. As they were finishing, the other man stood up and said there was forty in a bag. The two were not friends. Both were illegals. But they had different jobs.
The illegals were designed to be in deep cover with no contact with the Russian embassy. But they still needed human contact with Moscow. And Murphy’s lunch partner was the key. He was a wily, veteran spy and one of the most important illegals—but also the only one who did not permanently reside inside the United States.
His name was Christopher Metsos. Except, of course, it was not. It was Douglas Cox. Or Sean O’Donaill. Or Diego Cadenilla Jose Antonio. Or it could be Patrick Woolcocks. The real Patrick Woolcocks’s brief brush with Russian espionage came as he emerged from a restaurant in Moscow in 2004. Woolcocks, a Briton from Hampshire, worked in sales for a company that supplied TV and video technology and he was in the city on a business trip. He and some colleagues had just enjoyed a meal together in a Scandinavian restaurant when he left in a taxi. But he only made it twenty yards before the car was stopped
. Two men came up to him. They were dressed in leather overcoats—almost the stereotype of FSB officers. “Papers, papers,” they demanded. He dutifully handed over his British passport. They took it away to their vehicle, parked nearby. The minutes ticked by. Eventually they returned and handed the passport back to him. He thought little more about the incident until years later, when MI5 would interview him and as he began to have trouble at border controls. His identity had been stolen.
In all, there were at least eleven identities. Those were just the ones the FBI knew about. Some sounded Irish, some sounded Latin American, some Russian. The man who used them was in his fifties, with light brown hair, and was balding. Sometimes there were glasses, sometimes there were not. Sometimes there was a mustache and sometimes there was not. He was around six foot, an expert in disguise and a black belt in martial arts. The only distinguishing marks—a scar on his chest and burn or pock marks on his arms—were going to be hard to spot from a distance as he traveled the world changing his name and his face. The best guess is that his real name was Pavel Kapustin. But he has become known as Christopher Metsos.
Who or what was he? Metsos was what is called a Special Reserve Officer of Directorate S, also known as a “Traveling Illegal,” while the FBI called him an “Illegal of the Center.” These are experienced career intelligence officers who have usually already done their time as deep-cover illegals in another country. After returning to Moscow they are assigned to work as part of a team run out of the Special Reserve Unit of Department 1 of Directorate S. They are older and more experienced than the younger couples and individuals. They can be used for short-term, often risky missions. If an American whom the Russians wanted to try to recruit was seen in Cairo, a Special Reserve officer might be sent out to pitch to him. The advantage was that if it failed and this illegal was reported to the American or Egyptian authorities, then they would have already disappeared. If a member of the rezidentura in the embassy had tried and failed, they would be identified and potentially expelled, and if a deep-cover illegal tried it and failed the whole investment in their cover would be wasted. These officers can also be used to attempt a false-flag recruitment—posing as someone from, say, Spain in order to recruit someone who might be willing to betray secrets to that country but not to Russia. It goes without saying that they needed not just multiple identities but the best documents so they could move quickly and securely across borders.
The central identity this man used was Canadian. Metsos used a real passport obtained in the name of a real child who had died at age five. He had at least ten dates of birth for the years he was supposedly born, ranging from 1954 to 1959, although it is doubtful he had a party for each birthday. The FBI believes he first came to the United States for operational work as early as 1993, according to documents, but they will not say how much they know of his early career. In 1994, the then thirty-six-year-old was studying at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, a military academy founded in 1819. The two thousand students are half military cadets and half civilians. Metsos said he had come from Bogotà, Colombia (although the address he gave did not exist and the phone number he used belonged to a car wash). After the first half of the term in his sports medicine major, he disappeared. One possibility is that he was there to try to recruit a student who was on his way to becoming an officer in the US military, another that he was building a long-term cover and something went wrong. Where he went next is a mystery, like so much about him.
Special Reserve officers had the task of supporting deep-cover illegals. Metsos was based in Moscow but traveled around the world to meet them, including those in the United States. The systems of covert communications were the means for regular messages and the passing of orders from Moscow and intelligence back from the United States. But illegals also needed money. And this was not so easy. Nothing could be more incriminating than a transfer from a Moscow bank account into that of one of the illegals. And even payments routed through various third countries would still be a red flag to any investigation. Cash was far harder to trace. But it required someone to deliver it. And that was Metsos.
On May 16, 2004, an FBI surveillance team was waiting and watching in Queens, New York. They had video cameras on multiple positions around the Forest Hills station on the Long Island Rail Road. The cameras were carefully hidden. Video surveillance in such a fixed location was easier and safer than trying to have people follow the suspects and was possible thanks to the FBI’s source in Moscow.
The FBI was expecting a particularly significant meeting. Metsos and a second secretary (Poteyev’s old job title) from the Russian Mission to the UN were both spotted at the station separately but carrying nearly identical orange bags. Metsos walked up the stairs. The Russian walked down the stairs. It was a narrow stairwell and they passed close by each other in the middle. As they did, each handed the other the orange bag they had been carrying. This was a “brush contact”—a quick handoff. Metsos kept walking up and the Russian down. In the briefest moment, an exchange had been done. The bag was thought to contain a quarter of a million dollars. The money had gone black—moving from official diplomatic channels into the world of espionage. And the cash was destined for the illegal network. In this case, two illegal families—one in New Jersey, the other in Seattle.
Just hours later, Metsos was seeing Richard Murphy at the Sunnyside restaurant for one of their regular meetings. The FBI had it wired for sound and pictures. Metsos handed over a package that, he said, contained Murphy’s “cut.” It is thought this was about half—around $125,000. Metsos explained that the rest of the money being handed over was separate from Murphy’s cut. “You will meet this guy,” Metsos explained to Murphy, “tell him Uncle Paul loves him. . . . He will know.” There also seemed to be a bizarre recognition phrase. “He will know it is wonderful to be Santa Claus in May.”
THE FBI HAD installed a GPS tracking device on Metsos’s car. The next day it revealed him traveling eighty miles north to a rest stop near Wurtsboro, in Upstate New York. The FBI later found something in the area where the car had stopped. There was a partially buried upside-down brown beer bottle right next to a log and close to a telephone pole. The FBI team started to dig carefully. After they had cleared away five inches of dirt, they found a package wrapped in duct tape. A dead drop—a hiding place where something is left by one spy for another. The point of contact between two spies is the moment of greatest vulnerability and what a counterintelligence service is looking for. That is why a brush-past needs to be fast. A dead drop has the advantage of avoiding direct contact. The two spies will have been in the same place but separated by time.
Inside was the other half of the money. The FBI photographed it and left it in place. They set up a camera in a tree directly above to monitor this site. That way if anyone disturbed it, the FBI would have a good view. No one was sure how long they would have to wait to spot anything. The answer would be years. That was the way this investigation worked—long and slow.
Two weeks after the May 2004 Long Island Rail Road pickup, the FBI intercepted a phone call by Richard Murphy to Seattle, and to another pair of illegals. Mikhail Kutsik had arrived in 2001 under cover of being US citizen Michael Zottoli. The real Zottoli was born in Yonkers in 1970 but died a year and a half later. Natalia Pereverzeva arrived in 2003 as a Canadian named Patricia Mills. They were married on June 5, 2005, in Washington State. Both attended the University of Washington as business majors, graduating in 2006. One of his professors would occasionally share a shot of vodka with Zottoli and described him as one of the brightest students he taught. Washington State has always been high on the Russian target list, home to defense companies like Boeing, bases for nuclear submarines whose comings and goings can be watched, and communications infrastructure points as well as high-tech companies like Microsoft and Amazon. Zottoli and Mills’s aim was likely to get into one of the tech businesses or build contacts with those working there.
On June 18, 2004, after the phone call w
ith Murphy, Zottoli and Patricia Mills took a plane from Seattle to Newark airport and checked into a Manhattan hotel. The next day—at the agreed time of 3 p.m.—Zottoli arrived at one of the entrances to Central Park. An FBI team tailed him. Significant moments in the case may only come once or twice a year and two illegals meeting was one of them. They saw Mills sitting on a bench. She stayed there for an hour and a half looking toward the entrance where Zottoli was standing. She seemed to be carrying out countersurveillance for her partner, looking for anyone who might be tailing and watching Zottoli. She did not spot the FBI. But something went wrong. Murphy was nearby but Zottoli and Murphy do not appear to have spotted each other. Ironically, the FBI knew they were both nearby but the pair did not. The agreed location may not have been precise enough. After an hour and a half, Zottoli gave up and headed back to his hotel. That evening, Zottoli and Murphy spoke on the phone to try to work out what had gone wrong. “We might have, have different place in mind,” Murphy said. “I was there at three.” Zottoli replied, “I was there at three o’clock, too.” The FBI listening in knew they were both telling the truth. They agreed to try again the next day.
At 4 p.m. the next day Zottoli arrived at the metal globe near the subway entrance at Columbus Circle. He was wearing chinos and a T-shirt. The FBI could also see Murphy, wearing a stripy T-shirt and shorts and with a backpack. Murphy was taking pictures—like a tourist. At one point he aimed his camera directly at an FBI camera taking pictures from above him. But it seems to have been just chance. The FBI caught the moment on camera that the two men met and shook hands. It was 4:01 p.m. They were smiling. The pair went into Central Park but after just three minutes they headed in different directions. Zottoli was now carrying a red bag with a museum logo that he did not have before. Zottoli had the money that Murphy had received from Metsos. This was the first time the FBI saw two US-based illegals meet. It had been a brief encounter—they were together for only five minutes, no time to share pleasantries.
Russians Among Us Page 17
