The undercover asked Chapman to go over all the instructions. He added one thing he had forgotten, which was that she had to remind the recipient to sign the passport. Chapman complained she was tired and would have to explain all her travel that day. She was worried by her explanations to her boyfriend as to why on short notice she had had to travel three hours and would have to go back the next day. But she said she would carry out reconnaissance of the meeting place that evening.
She was nervous. “You’re positive no one is watching?” she asked the undercover.
“You know how long it took me to get here? Three hours,” he explained. That was a reference to how long the undercover was claiming he had been “dry-cleaning” in order to be sure he was not followed. The meeting was coming to an end. “Your colleagues back in Moscow, they know you are doing a good job and they will tell you this when they see you. So keep it up.” Again, it was the attempt to play on Chapman’s ego and desire to impress.
She was finding it tough and there was a moment toward the end of the conversation where she reached out. “Is it difficult for you?” she asked.
“This is my job, you know? It’s busy, it’s long days because I have to do work at the consulate and other work,” he explained.
“So you work in the consulate?” she asked.
For four years, he explained. She was showing signs of suspicion. “So who instructed you to do this?” Chapman asked.
“I don’t have any answers. I just have instructions,” he said.
“Okay, it’s just really scary,” she said, suddenly sounding vulnerable. But she also seemed to sense something was not quite right.
The undercover tried to encourage her. “Good luck,” he said. “I may see you in Moscow.” That was unlikely. It was now around 5 p.m.
ON THE SAME day that Anna Chapman had been lured into a trap in New York, Mikhail Semenko was walking into his own in Washington, DC. Another FBI undercover posing as a Russian called Semenko on his cell phone. “Could we have met in Beijing in 2004?” the undercover asked, using an agreed name and recognition code. “Yes, we might have, but I believe it was in Harbin,” Semenko replied. The two arranged to meet later near the intersection of Tenth Street and H Street NW in Washington, DC, about a five-minute walk from the FBI’s headquarters. Semenko was two minutes early. At exactly 7:30 p.m. the FBI agent walked up to him. He was wearing a wire. The same recognition phrase was exchanged and they walked to a nearby park.
The FBI man explained he wanted to talk about an attempted electronic communication on June 5. The undercover said it had not worked. “I got mine,” Semenko responded, explaining that everything looked fine. This was a problem for the FBI—the cover story was not being bought. Who had trained him to use the equipment? “The Center guys,” Semenko explained. That was what the FBI wanted to hear. Was Semenko keeping the equipment safe? Semenko got annoyed and explained he would erase the hard drive if something went wrong. What about the prearranged meeting place when he received a particular signal? Semenko explained that his only meeting place was the Russian consulate in New York. That was evidence tying him to the Russian state.
There was a problem, though. Semenko seemed to be suspicious. He was curious about the fact that the Washington street corner they had just met at had been proposed as a potential meeting site but had never been approved. The FBI did not know that the SVR had actually rejected the location—perhaps because it was so close to the FBI. There had been a meeting to decide that recently. Only later the Russians would realize that one person had been absent from the meeting where that had been decided—Alexander Poteyev. The undercover handed Semenko a folded newspaper. This was almost as clichéd as you get in terms of spying: two strangers meeting and talking on a park bench and one handing over a newspaper with something inside. Inside was an envelope containing $5,000. The undercover explained that it had to be delivered to a park in Arlington the next day between 11 and 11:30 a.m. Semenko asked for a precise description of the location and was given a map. There was a spot underneath a bridge where the money was to be left. He was told to memorize the information on the map and then hand it back so it could be destroyed. But as he left, the FBI was wondering: had Semenko smelled a rat?
Meanwhile, things were going wrong with Anna Chapman. An FBI team watched her as she left the cafe. She headed to Brooklyn. At 6 p.m., they saw her enter a CVS pharmacy store. Next she went to a Verizon store nearby. This was odd. The FBI team began to worry. After leaving the Verizon store she went to a Rite Aid pharmacy and then went back to the Verizon store. This was now looking like seriously unusual behavior. She should have either carried out reconnaissance of the next day’s meeting site or headed home. It also looked like she was doing a surveillance detection route. She had some training and was doing her best but she was no professional spy. But why the Verizon store? Was she buying a burner phone to make an emergency call? “I was kind of proud of her a little bit because this was her first well-executed operational act,” says Maria Ricci, who was watching. “She went to a strange place. She bought a drop phone.”
But Chapman made a crucial mistake. When she left the store a second time, she threw a Verizon bag into the garbage. The FBI team was watching her close enough to spot this. As soon as she left the area, a member of the Special Surveillance Group pulled the bag out of the garbage. Inside was a customer agreement for the purchase of a Motorola cell phone. It had been taken out in the name of Irine Kutsova. The address had been as fake as the name and was almost beyond parody: “99 Fake Street, Brooklyn.” There was also packaging for two different prepaid calling cards that could be used to make international calls. The charging device for the phone was left in the bag. It had clearly been purchased as a burner for one-time use under a fake name. Chapman was worried. She no longer trusted her regular communications and wanted to make urgent contact. She had left the meeting and gone into panic mode. The FBI operation, at the last moment, was at risk of unraveling. Everyone was nervous but now this looked catastrophic. Was the illegals operation going to fall apart on the last day?
This was now a full-blown crisis for the FBI. “We believe that she was quickly processing that she may have come to the attention of the FBI,” Todd A. Shelton of the bureau later recalled. “We were very concerned that if she sent a distress signal to the SVR they may in turn send an emergency signal to all of the illegals and we would lose them all.” Senior FBI officials were looking at their watches and clocks. The arrests were due to take place across the country in less than twenty-four hours. But Anna Chapman had gone off the rails.
THE QUESTION FOR the FBI was what to do now. One option would be to bring everything forward by a day and arrest all the illegals. But there was a problem. Russian president Medvedev was still at the G20 in Canada. And the FBI was under strict orders from the White House not to move until he had left. They were straining at the leash. And there were real risks to the whole Ghost Stories investigation. If Chapman was suspicious enough there was still a chance she might contact Moscow Center and send an emergency signal, which, in the worst-case scenario, could lead to all the illegals grabbing a passport ready for just such an accusation and fleeing.
CHAPMAN’S MISTAKE WAS the receipt. It provided the FBI with the number of her phone. That night the FBI was up on the phone and able to listen as she made a series of dramatic calls on the way up to a boyfriend’s place in Connecticut and through the night. And who did she call? Her father—the spy.
Something strange had happened, she told him, taking him through the story. He listened carefully. So did the FBI. He sounded worried. That was bad.
He seemed more aware of the dangers than his daughter. At one point, when she revealed she had handed over her special laptop, he got angry. “You did what?” he lit into her. But what should she do? The first call ended. He tried to get hold of someone in Moscow—likely at the SVR—but it was the early hours of Sunday morning and senior officers were not around. When Chapman’s father
called back, his instructions were surprising. He recognized it might be bad, but she was not to panic. Instead she was to report the incident to the police. The FBI team would scratch their heads about his advice. Perhaps it was wishful thinking? For Anna, running now meant ending everything, giving up on life as a spy and the New York lifestyle that went with it. Rather than think that the operation was blown and it was all over, perhaps it was just easier to hope that this had been some prank by what he called a “hooligan” or perhaps at most a provocation. Even in the worst case, that she was under investigation, what proof might they have? Many years earlier, Kim Philby, the treacherous former MI6 officer, lectured a KGB audience and gave them his most valuable lesson after being confronted by his colleagues—never confess. They never had as much on you as you feared, he said. Her father, who perhaps had been in that audience, told an unsure Anna to bluff it out.
What would an innocent person do if a Russian had approached them and asked them to hand over a passport? They would report it to the police. That was what her father asked her to do. The problem was that this overlooked his daughter’s mistake in handing over an operational laptop to someone she was going to claim now was a complete stranger.
There was still a risk for the FBI. They knew her father could call the SVR and ask if it was their person whom she met. They would say no. But the good news was that it was a weekend. It was now early Sunday morning in Moscow. If a message did get through to Yasenevo, it would only be to the duty officer. A more senior officer would need to be called on the weekend and would then need to make a decision. How serious did the situation look? How likely was it that she was really compromised? Her encounter was certainly odd, but it was hard to tell how bad it was. Pulling out one illegal after all the investment was not something to take lightly. And there was nothing to suggest compromises of any of the other illegals (whom Chapman did not know). Even if someone did think the worst, a decision to get her out was not going to be taken immediately. That was something the FBI had counted on. Doing the false flag the day before the planned arrests was deliberate. Just in case it triggered an avalanche of concern, they would still have time to move.
And of course, there was an additional factor in play. Who would the duty officer in the SVR call to discuss Chapman’s concerns? One person they might call was the deputy head of the department that ran the American illegals. He was not going to be easy to get hold of.
In Belarus, Alexander Poteyev was on the move. He did most of the journey by himself and under his own steam. He now used a fake passport given to him by the CIA to travel, again by train, to western Ukraine, the Russians believe. The passport was in the name of a Viktor Dudochkin. There was a real Dudochkin who had handed his passport over to the US embassy in Moscow in 2009 for a visa application. The FSB would later believe that this had been secretly copied by the CIA. This would have been the most tense moment on the escape. If there were suspicions among the illegals that had been fed back to the SVR and someone had checked on his whereabouts, then they might be looking for him. Handing over a false passport to a border official also was a moment of jeopardy. But as each stage of the journey passed, Poteyev moved farther and farther away from the hands of his former colleagues.
It was a hot June Sunday, which did little to dampen the tension as the day of the arrests began. Much could still go wrong in the coming twelve hours before Medvedev’s plane took off. The first question was whether Semenko and Chapman would fall into their traps and provide enough evidence to arrest them.
Just yards from where Semenko had been meeting, the whole operation was being coordinated out of the Strategic Information and Operations Center (SIOC) at FBI headquarters, on the fourth floor. This is where major events and unfolding crises are tracked. There are more than a thousand telephone lines as well as screens showing live feeds of surveillance and conference rooms for senior leaders to coordinate. Craig Fair was in day-to-day control. There had been twenty-four-hours-a-day physical surveillance on all the illegals for the days leading up to the arrest and especially once Poteyev was on the move. The nerves were jangling that a compromise of any of the surveillance by being spotted could also lead to an emergency signal. They knew every illegal had an emergency escape plan and fresh identities to support it. Anna Chapman would later claim that she had been suspicious that she was being followed in the days leading up to the arrests. She would claim her concerns were sent back to Moscow and to the man who was deputy head of Department 4. Poteyev, of course, would have ignored them.
There was also one additional fear. If the Russians had a penetration of the FBI and CIA they would have normally done everything possible to protect that mole and not act on their intelligence in a way that revealed their existence. But one thing they would not let happen is a large group of SVR officers getting arrested. And so there was always this lurking fear that perhaps suddenly the illegals might all disappear as the net began to close, if there was someone on the inside who could tip them off.
A surveillance team was watching the dead-drop site in the park that Semenko was supposed to be servicing. They could not get close enough to observe in person so they had installed a camera. But there was no live feed, so the tension at the command center was palpable the next day as 11 a.m. approached. To everyone’s relief, Semenko, in T-shirt and shorts, appeared and approached over a small wooden footbridge. He was carrying a white bag. At 11:06 he crawled beneath the bridge. It was awkward and would have looked suspicious to anyone watching. He kept coming out and glancing around. He removed the newspaper holding the envelope from the bag and placed it on the underside of the bridge. He looked around to make sure no one was watching and then left. Once they were sure he was gone, FBI agents went to the drop site and extracted the newspaper and envelope. The money was inside. Semenko had taken the bait.
Anna Chapman, though, was another story.
THAT SUNDAY AT 11 a.m., an FBI undercover officer was waiting near the World Financial Center in New York City. He was looking for a redhead with a magazine, ready to get confused about whether they had met in California or the Hamptons. The minutes passed. Chapman was a no-show.
She was never an early riser, even when fearing being exposed as a spy, and after staying at a boyfriend’s place, she arrived back in Manhattan in midmorning. By lunchtime she had turned up at the 1st Precinct station of the NYPD in downtown Manhattan. “This really scary thing happened to me and I didn’t know what to do,” she told a police officer. It was a confusing tale involving a strange man, passports, and laptops. Because she had been scared, she explained, she had agreed with everything the man had told her to do.
Fortunately for the FBI, because they had been listening to the call with her father, they were waiting. Overnight and under huge pressure, they had cooked up a plan to stall Chapman. Two FBI agents had been sent to the 1st Precinct police station posing as detectives. One of them was now listening with great sympathy to her story. But they needed to play for time. It was still hours until Medvedev left North American airspace. It was a bizarre situation. They had a Russian spy in a police station and an arrest warrant in the room next door but they were not allowed to serve it because of orders from the White House. They had no choice but to play it long.
“Anna, what happened to you?”
She told the story to one officer. And she was asked about every detail. “Oh, my God, that is a crazy story. Let me get my partner in.” In came the other officer. “Now, Anna, please tell the story again from the beginning.” More questions. When that was over, it was on to phase two. “Here, look at these mug shot books. Tell me if you see anyone you recognize.” They began to show Chapman photos of people she might have met in the cafe the previous day. She was obviously never going to spot the person, given that he was an undercover FBI officer and so were the two people she was talking to. But there were a lot of mug shots to go through. The whole charade went on for hours.
From Ukraine, Poteyev traveled to Frankfurt, Germany.
From there he took a flight to the United States. He was back in the country that had recruited him all those years before in New York. The whole journey was monitored closely at CIA headquarters. Director Panetta was in touch with Robert Mueller at the FBI to make sure everything was coordinated. “Once we knew the source was safe we could proceed with the arrests,” CIA director Panetta recalls (although like other officials involved in the operation he will not confirm the source’s identity).
Finally, word came into the command posts on Sunday evening that Medvedev was in the air. The arrest teams were ready to move. In Chapman’s case, they did not need to go far. They walked into the room at the police station and slapped on the handcuffs. Anna Chapman’s spying career was over. But her time in the limelight was just beginning. And for the other illegals, after years, sometimes decades, living a lie, this was the day it would all end.
20
The Day It Ends
AT THE HEATHFIELDS’ house in Boston, June 27 was a day of celebration. Their youngest son, Alex, had just come back from six months in Singapore and it was the twentieth birthday of Timothy, their eldest son. Donald Heathfield and Alex were also about to head to Russia via Paris, with Timothy following after. The family had been out to their favorite local Indian restaurant for a buffet lunch to celebrate. They returned to their suburban home on Trowbridge Street by 4 p.m. and opened a bottle of champagne. The brothers were tired from a house party the previous evening and were upstairs when there was a knock on the door. They were not expecting anyone, but their mother shouted up that it must be some friends of Timothy’s who had come to surprise him. When she opened the door, there were people dressed in black. The brothers thought it might be a birthday prank. It took only seconds to realize it was not. Half a dozen men and women were at the door. “I remember vividly the FBI agents entering our house with weapons as I walked down the stairs,” Alex Foley later said in an affidavit. “My parents were handcuffed in front of my eyes.” FBI officers remember it differently. They say there was a knock on the door. Ann Foley opened it and stepped outside to talk to them. Everything was calm. If there had not been so many people there for the search, the neighbors might not have noticed anything amiss.
Russians Among Us Page 24
