Now that he was back in the United States, the FBI watched Zottoli and Mills leave their Arlington apartment in their gray BMW sedan on March 6 at 12:25 p.m. By 6 p.m. they arrived at a hotel on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The next morning, the FBI were in the Fort Greene neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Murphy and Zottoli had met in September 2009. At 11 a.m., agents saw Zottoli meet Murphy at a pay phone on the corner of Vanderbilt and DeKalb Avenues. Murphy had a backpack and Zottoli a duffel bag. Again it was supposed to be a quick meeting. But, like September, it would go on much longer. This time they went to a coffee shop rather than the park. No one had known they were going to that coffee shop (although it was always a possibility, given the weather was cold), but in one of the bizarre coincidences that sometimes characterize surveillance operations, inside sat FBI agent Maria Ricci. She had been sitting at a window seat for hours, ready to watch the two men meet directly across the street.
Now the two illegals sat down right next to her. She had been watching Murphy for years, knowing every detail of his life, while he had no idea who she was. It was almost surreal. But it was also an opportunity that could not be missed. Ricci texted another female on the team and organized for her to go to the women’s bathroom with a surveillance camera. “I ended up doing my own brush-past in the bathroom to get a camera.” She placed the small camera by her leg and tried to train it on the pair. This was not what she had expected to be doing. “God, I hope it’s facing the right direction,” she thought. The Russians again talked for much longer than strictly necessary. “They ended up talking for a couple of hours so I ended up sitting in that spot drinking coffee for four hours,” says Ricci.
The FBI overheard the pair, who never spoke in Russian, discussing Mills’s and Zottoli’s problems with their computer equipment. “This should help,” Murphy responded. He removed a plastic shopping bag with the laptop inside from his backpack and put it into Zottoli’s duffel bag. It took a few moments and was far from the subtlest of handovers. “If this doesn’t work we can meet again in six months,” he went on. Then came a telling phrase. “They don’t understand what we go through over here.” The “they” was clearly Moscow Center. Ricci sat so close that when Zottoli leaned back in his chair after getting his backpack, his chair knocked hers and the camera shook. A second or two later, a figure came over and handed Ricci a coffee. Much to their later amusement, all three FBI agents had—by complete accident—worn exactly the same clothes that day: blue jeans and a black sweater. It was as if the message had gone out to tell them the FBI surveillance look for the day. Eventually, the long meeting was finished and the illegals departed.
Two days later, Murphy sent a message to Moscow Center reporting that the laptop and nine thousand dollars in cash had been successfully delivered. He also relayed the problems that Zottoli was having with the equipment, which involved some kind of “hanging” or “freezing.” There was one more message to pass on. His wife, Patricia Mills, was worried about some fake travel documents she had been due to use. Zottoli said she could not leave the United States because the documentary requirements for entry at her destination had just changed that year. Zottoli and Mills needed advice on what to do about their cover problems.
The illegals were busy but they did not know that the clock was counting down on their life in America. They had just over three months left.
16
Anna Takes Manhattan
“RELENTLESS” IS HOW one of the acquaintances who encountered Anna Chapman in New York remembers her. He was a single, middle-aged corporate lawyer who enjoyed the good life. She was introduced to him at a fancy dinner in Soho. There were about twenty people there; more than half were women from various parts of the world. At first he thought she was just like the other young Russian women in New York who were all pretty and well dressed but very clear about what they were after. So he made sure she knew he was not interested in her type. But she would not give up. Somehow she got his number from a friend and began texting him, asking to meet. She kept texting. Again and again over the next few weeks. So he checked her out with a few people in the business community—well-placed people who had known her from her former life in London as well as now in New York, the type who worked in finance and traveled the Atlantic regularly, “hedge fund guys.” They all vouched for her—clearly her time in London had been well spent; her connections were paying off. “She knew everyone,” he says. Soon they were dating and she was around his place. It was not just the looks. “She had this confidence about her you don’t see in many people. You could drop her anywhere and she would find her way,” he says. Later, when he found out the truth, he would wonder if she had had some kind of training in psychological manipulation. “She really understood people,” he says, before pausing and adding, “men in particular.”
From January 2010, Manhattan was home for Anna Chapman and she hit the town hard. She had been traveling back and forth from Russia for a while but now she was permanently based in New York. Her business card carried the slogan “Explore Your Possibilities.” That was a pretty good description of what Anna Chapman was doing. She had worked the London party scene and now it was Manhattan’s turn. She went to exclusive bars, wore the best clothes. There were rumors she was a millionaire. She was a superb networker—just like Donald Heathfield but in a very different world.
Her work was selling property in America to rich Russians online. A $1 million loan from a Russian government fund for startups may have helped her on her way. In April, she sat down for an interview for a New York Entrepreneur Week event. She had the start-up spiel down pat, explaining that the idea for the company had come about when she was trying to buy an apartment in London and could not find one place that brought together all the information online someone needed. And so she decided to start her own business “to help” people. She also claimed she had been an investment banker before giving that up to follow her dream in New York. “All dreams may come true if you act on it,” she explained. “I was someone who just arrived in New York, I didn’t know anyone,” she said. “Now I know a lot of people who introduce me to someone else, and they introduce me to someone else.” She was, staff recall, a great boss who was always a good gift giver and who managed to be both professional and enjoy life. A team member recalls that Chapman always wanted to keep the company servers in Russia.
Chapman was assiduous in looking for leads for people for her start-up but there was also the personal side. She spent a lot of time at high-end parties. “She was acting kind of scandalous,” recalled one woman who had met Chapman at a club. “She was playing around, it was a joke, unbuttoning a guy’s shirt. Not vulgar, but very flirtatious.” She met hundreds and hundreds of people. Anna had one gift for a spy—she knew how to get men to talk. In six months in New York, she made serious inroads in terms of meeting influential people, mainly from the financial world rather than the political. The new breed of illegal was moving a lot faster than the old.
Bill Staniford met her soon after she started to visit New York. He was working for a property-tech company and some Russians he knew in the industry said they had a friend in town who was trying to start something up in a similar field. Could they meet? “She had no clue about real estate or real estate technology. None,” Staniford recalls. But he was surprised at her fancy apartment at 20 Exchange Place near Wall Street, an art-deco masterpiece built in the early thirties. On the fifty-second floor, it had a killer view and left him wondering who was backing her (she would sometimes tell people she had Russian investors).
She was intelligent, engaging, and very gregarious, upbeat and full of energy, almost hyper, he found. She was certainly ambitious. “She wanted to maintain her lifestyle. That’s what she really liked,” Staniford says. Good restaurants, fine wine, and fancy clothes.
They did not go into business, but they did start a relationship. Staniford had an interesting past. A former marine, he was working as a military cryptologic linguist for the National Security Age
ncy (NSA) in the early 1990s, holding top secret clearances. In Panama in 1992, he says he was approached by a Russian in a bar who seemed to know a lot of personal details about him. Once Anna Chapman’s real work was exposed, he would wonder if the Russians had targeted him because they suspected he was working for the CIA, since he was traveling frequently to Eastern Europe for his business (he was not doing anything secret). Even more bizarrely, his father had a longtime accountant who did his taxes. And who else worked for that small accountancy firm? Cynthia Murphy. If the Russians did want to know about him and his family, they would have plenty of personal details to work on. Even if he had not been targeted and it was all just coincidence, this was an example of how two different illegals might be able to offer two separate streams of information about someone—their finances and their personal life—and if they were of interest, then have Moscow Center use those to work out how they might approach them.
Chapman, Staniford says, would occasionally test him by saying negative things about the US government, criticizing its actions in Afghanistan. Chapman was also interested in meeting people—Staniford’s cousin had been Speaker of the New York City Council. He also took her for a weekend to Las Vegas, where they walked around the Bellagio. “She was like a kid in a candy store.” But he thinks Chapman realized he was neither CIA nor a particularly useful target for recruitment. The relationship continued in a casual fashion for the next few months, leaving Staniford one of those left in her wake after the arrest, like a whirlwind that had passed through. Another paramour of Anna’s recalls a conversation where she opened up just a bit. She lamented that she might never have children or a normal family life. It was as if she knew there was a cost to the path she had chosen, however glamorous it seemed on the outside.
The FBI knew all about her love life because they had been watching her as soon as she had arrived in January 2010. The New York field office, including Derek Pieper and Maria Ricci, was on her tail. On January 20, an FBI team was at a coffee shop near the corner of Forty-Seventh Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan. They had covert video cameras for their surveillance mission. Seated near the window they could see the young redhead. She had a tote bag with her. Ten minutes after she arrived, a minivan passed by the window of the coffee shop.
Another FBI team was watching that vehicle. They knew it was being driven by a Russian official from the mission to the UN, Poteyev’s former base. Chapman and the Russian never actually met or spoke but the FBI believed their proximity was no coincidence. This was the moment Anna Chapman was going to make contact with the SVR’s Moscow Center, through a smart technological trick—a temporary private wireless network in which two laptop computers pair with each other.
One laptop is preconfigured to create its own private wireless local area network but only to communicate with another specific laptop based on its media access control (MAC) address. This is a unique address assigned by the manufacturer to a device that is publicly broadcast through a radio transmission when it is looking for a device connected to the internet. When the first laptop spotted the unique address of the second close by, it established a private network. Data could then flow between Chapman’s laptop and that of the Russian outside. The advantage was that the data would never flow over the regular internet, where it could be swept up. There is obviously still a risk of that stream of data being intercepted by someone close by looking for it so it can also be scrambled using specialized encryption software.
It was a clever trick and should have been impossible to detect—unless of course you had a spy inside the SVR. Poteyev had told the CIA everything about Chapman and how she would be operating. And so the FBI team fired up a commercially available piece of software that searched for the presence of wireless networks. They soon spotted one emerge between two computers. One was in the coffee shop. The other was in the minivan. It did not last long. It became clear the Chapman meetings were scheduled on a regular basis.
On March 17, a team of seven FBI special agents were watching Chapman. She was observed at 11:29 a.m. walking westbound on Warren Street between Church Street and West Broadway. She was wearing a yellow T-shirt and blue jeans and carrying a black bag. She went west down Greenwich Street and entered Barnes & Noble bookstore at 97 Warren Street at 11:35. She sat in the cafe and turned her laptop on. At the moment Chapman powered on her laptop, the FBI was able to detect a computer broadcasting a signal. Three minutes later, another computer joined it. One of the FBI team, Amit Kacchia-Patel, watched as Chapman plugged a cord into the laptop. It was not the power cord. The wire led into her bag. She began typing. Then she was seen pulling the cord out and putting it back in. Was something wrong? Meanwhile, the Russian was across the street carrying a briefcase. Chapman was in the store for half an hour. The Russian was outside for about twenty minutes. At 11:59 she left the table and three minutes later walked out of the store. At 12:20 surveillance was terminated.
Over the next six months, the FBI would see a clear pattern of activity. On ten Wednesdays they would observe Anna Chapman in the vicinity of the Russian government official. The FBI believes a variety of meeting points were used partly to test the communications system. How well would it work in a busy built-up city? Would the signal get through in Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Rockefeller Center, where there would be countless other invisible data streams flying through the air around it? But it was also about the SVR testing Anna Chapman herself. How good was the young woman at being a wannabe spy and using technology and tradecraft? What became clear was that Chapman was having problems with the signal. FBI agents would sometimes sit just feet away from her in a cafe and try to learn how she was using her spy computer. She would often switch the laptop on and off and plug the cord in and pull it out, apparently to try to get it working. The problems were not due to FBI interference. The FBI had wondered at one point about jamming or collecting the signals, but the legal technicalities of doing so were complex since you had to be sure not to affect any of the other myriad of signals going through the air in the same area. Watching these meetings was vital in collecting evidence to build a case against Chapman. Since she was not using a false identity like the family illegals, they needed to prove she was engaging in illicit behavior.
On April 17, disaster nearly struck. An FBI team was assigned to carry out surveillance on the Russian official who was going to communicate with Chapman. Normally the FBI did not need to actually follow him to the meeting. Because they were inside the communications of the illegals, they knew where the meeting was going to take place and so could simply stake out the location in advance and wait. One team would then watch Chapman and another the Russian. The FBI knew the Russians were using devices in their embassies and missions to try to monitor radio traffic. The content of any FBI radio communications would be encrypted, but if the Russians noticed an uptick in the amount of unreadable traffic when one of their diplomats left the embassy, then they might know something was up, and if they noticed that traffic move with the person, they would be highly suspicious that there was surveillance on the person. This all meant it was easier to just wait at the meeting point.
But surveillance resources were tight. Counterintelligence had to compete with counterterrorism. In some of the illegals’ cases, surveillance teams stayed on a single target for years—the same team did the Murphy family for close to a decade because they did not need to be followed day-to-day or up close. But with the Chapman meetings, a team was required every two weeks. And because they were in close proximity to her in cafes, it had to be a new team every two weeks to avoid the risk of anyone being recognized. On April 17, a new team made a mistake. They followed the Russian diplomat as he embarked on his surveillance detection route when he left his office in midtown Manhattan. FBI agent Derek Pieper was sitting in position waiting for the meeting. When he realized what was going on he began to freak out. As he listened to the team move two hours early, he was screaming in his head, “STOP. STOP.” But it was too late.
This could have been a disaster. Had the operation been blown? The team held their breath. Only a trained intelligence officer would have spotted the surveillance and aborted. This was textbook spy behavior. It confirmed the Russian official was clearly no diplomat. But now a lot depended on how the Russian interpreted the surveillance. Since he worked out of the UN mission, the hope was that he might have thought he would be under occasional FBI surveillance whether they knew he was a spy or not, and this was simply part of that. The next few days were tense for the FBI team in New York as they waited to see what the fallout would be. Might there be a signal to Chapman that something was wrong?
To their immense relief, the next meeting took place on schedule. It would have been much more serious if Chapman had spotted surveillance, since she would not expect to have seen anyone, given she was under deeper cover. The advantage the FBI had with Chapman was that she was not a fully trained intelligence officer. The deep-cover family illegals like Heathfield and Foley had gone through rigorous training back in Moscow in surveillance detection routes, because if they had been spotted meeting with a Russian official it would have been a disaster. After all, they were supposed to be Canadian or American. For Chapman, living openly as a Russian, coming up with a cover story for meeting a Russian was easier and so the risk was lower. The nature of these new special agent illegals was that they did not receive the same level of training in tradecraft as the family variety. On the whole, the FBI team who tracked her every move was not impressed with Chapman’s spy tradecraft skills. Where she was extraordinarily skilled was getting men to talk. That was what made her dangerous. Her potential, they realized, was in direct proportion to the willingness of men to talk to a pretty woman. And that, some of the female FBI agents reflected with a wry smile, was a lot. They watched in awe as she went to party after party—the kind of parties, Maria Ricci thought, she would not have the clothes to go to. They could see she was starting to get close to people who mattered. One FBI officer reckoned that another six months and she would have ended up being the illegal who might have gotten closest to real power and intelligence.
Russians Among Us Page 19
