Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  Old SVR hands did their best to defuse this line of attack. “Even if we knew the final amount it would be trifling in comparison with the huge profit which we could get from the work of intelligence agents in the future,” explained Yuri Kobaladze, a former KGB and SVR officer. “Imagine that 11 people, embedded, settled in, and absolutely naturalized, go to work at the CIA or the Pentagon in a couple of years; Anna Chapman marries a Senator; and Russia starts to receive top secret information. This means millions!” Here perhaps was the most succinct explanation of what SVR officers had in mind for the illegals to achieve. But the time of the old illegals was passing. There would be new ones to take their place.

  FOR THE ILLEGALS themselves, there was now a new life to come to terms with and some complicated relationships. The first time Donald Heathfield—now Andrey Bezrukov—met his sons after release, he was still in his orange prison uniform. “It was already late, but we talked deep into the night,” Alex Foley later said. “Slowly, we began to discuss their past. We discovered a confusing patchwork: stories from their childhood having been real, but taking place in the Soviet Union, not in Canada or Europe. In general, my parents were open and spoke about their hidden lives and identities. With regards to their methods or missions, my brother and I were smart enough to not ask questions where we knew we would be better off not knowing the answers.” Bezrukov would say he spent the first month explaining his life to his sons. “In the end, they had an understanding of why we made a certain choice in life,” he would say. “They understood us,” his wife, Elena Vavilova, said. “They understood our choice and accepted it.” What had it been like to be born in the Soviet Union, work in America, and then return to Russia? “The fact that I left the country, which was called the Soviet Union, and returned to one called Russia, did not affect me in any way,” Bezrukov would say. “For me, this is one country. My country.”

  For the children, though, Russia had not been their country and it was a deeply disorienting time. Parents had to explain to their sons and daughters that they were not who they thought they were. Their lives had been built on deceptions that had now been exposed. In one case, according to multiple sources, the children of one illegal family, likely the Murphys, were left alone in a room in a building used by Russian intelligence. Their parents then walked in. But now they were in full Russian military uniform. That was thought to be the best way to convey the truth of who they really were. How the children reacted is not known, but it would be hard to imagine anything other than shock and bewilderment. One thing that convinced the Foley boys of the truth was when their mother showed she could take down Morse code at twenty groups a minute with almost no mistakes.

  The illegals and their families were taken on a tour after their return. They went to St. Petersburg, the Black Sea, and Siberia. It was a chance to reacquaint themselves with the country they served or, in some cases, to see it for the first time. They would have made a motley crew, retired Juan Lazaro, Anna Chapman, and some bewildered kids.

  But what were the illegals to do now? Could they go back to work for Directorate S? That was not possible. Trust was always the issue with those who had lived abroad. When the illegal Rudolf Abel returned after his swap, he complained of being a “museum exhibit” and not being used very much. That was because the KGB feared he might have been turned in American detention. His bedroom was surrounded with listening equipment in case he talked in his sleep and revealed the truth. “He was sore as hell,” one friend said of his treatment. The same risk meant that the former illegals could no longer work on active operations although they were all decorated with awards and medals.

  Eventually, jobs were found for all the illegals—and good ones at that. They had to be successes, after all. Michael Zottoli, now Mikhail Kutsik, went to work for Gazprom and in 2018 met EU officials to talk about regulatory issues for the industry.

  Donald Heathfield had the most prominent profile. He maintained a LinkedIn page under the name “Donald Heathfield aka Andrey Bezrukov,” with a picture of him smoking a big, fat cigar. (His wife, Elena Vavilova, maintained a LinkedIn page with a rather more playful picture listing her as having become an adviser at Norilsk Nickel, a Russian mining company, in early 2011.) Heathfield got a job as an adviser to Igor Sechin, the president of the energy giant Rosneft and one of Putin’s closest allies. He also lectured at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations with a distinctive accent that veers between Moscow and Boston. “Class with Andrei Bezrukov, a former spy within the United States, was one of the highlights,” one visiting student from Seton Hall University in New Jersey said. “The class was very informative.”

  WHAT’S IT LIKE to be a spy? Bezrukov was asked by a class of Russian students in May 2018. “Just watch The Americans—I’m not kidding,” he told them, although a show of hands revealed most had not seen the award-winning TV series about illegals set in the 1980s, and which had been inspired by his own career. Bezrukov had watched it in Moscow and was a fan. “The result is quite close to reality,” he said, “though without the killings and the wigs. The creators of the series were able to show the atmosphere, and the inner feelings of illegals, and the difficulties, including personal ones, that one has to face, and the personality that is required to do such work. Many moments are conveyed accurately, honestly, and professionally. My wife and I did not expect that the American creators of the series would be willing and able to show the characters of the spies so deeply and unbiasedly, even with sympathy.”

  “The producers have captured well the atmosphere of the eighties,” Vavilova told me recently. “The illegals have a human side with believable emotions and problems of their daily life. However, violence and disguise are never part of the professional work. This way the spies would have not been able to last for a long time. I believe those scenes were necessary to keep the attention of the viewers. . . . I can hardly believe that real illegals could have met their handler inside the US and they would have immediately moved to another house after discovering that an FBI agent lives just across. But again, real life and movies are not the same thing.”

  Ironically, many US officials who worked on the case struggled to watch the show. It was too close to home and they were wary of the attempts to portray the Russian spies too sympathetically. Told about Heathfield’s view of his own fictional portrayal, one person who watched him while he was undercover comments wryly: “I guarantee his sex life was not as interesting as theirs.”

  Watching the show, Bezrukov’s brain would suddenly switch back to English language. And the family still spoke together mainly in English five years after the swap, he said in an interview. It took nearly five years for the pain and for a kind of nostalgia for the past—to hear the language and live in America—to disappear. “What I regret most of all, is that I did not have an opportunity to complete my mission,” he said. He and Elena had to rebuild relationships. “We had lost all our friends. I have lost my father. But some people who worked abroad much longer than we did, came back to emptiness. No parents, no friends. Nothing,” he later said. The greatest toll had been on his family rather than himself. “Nobody asked my kids whether they wanted to live the life like that. Or what are the consequences of being the sons of spies or something like that or parents who didn’t see us for long, long years. In fact, we create more problems for the generation before or generation after. That’s the biggest human drawback in this. Otherwise, it’s the job I loved.” His wife also felt she had done the right thing. “There are certainly no regrets that I made this choice back then,” she said in Tomsk years later. “Were I offered to start my life again, beginning with my student years, I think I would have made the same choice. . . . For me my profession has become my life.” She kept the orange prison uniform she was swapped in.

  NOW IT WAS their children’s turn to be strangers in a strange land. They were Russians by blood but not by culture or upbringing. All of Alex’s and Timothy’s plans for their future were torn in shreds and they
found themselves living in Moscow, far away from friends and their former life, unable to speak the language. There could not be anything other than some degree of resentment at what they had been put through by no choice of their own, even though the family bonds would ultimately prove strong. The boys’ nationality was contested as they entered a bizarre netherworld. It turned out that unpicking a persona for the sons of illegals was nearly as complicated a process as building one for their parents. The United States said Alex’s passport and citizenship were no longer valid. When they heard talk the boys wanted to come to America, a senior FBI official and his deputy met with two counterparts from the Russian embassy at an Italian restaurant near FBI headquarters. No one ate anything. The Russians folded their arms and listened as the FBI officials explained that the United States did not want the children in the country and the Russians should tell them to stop trying.

  Alex found even his name was no longer his own. He was given a Russian passport under his new name: Alexander Vavilov—taking after his mother. He applied for a Canadian passport using his old birth certificate. He was told he would have to amend the birth certificate to reflect the change in his and his parents’ names and provide DNA evidence to establish his relationship with them. Then, if he wanted a passport in the name Foley, he needed to legally change his name back after the Vavilov birth certificate was issued. With a new birth certificate, he tried to get a Canadian passport and was told he needed a citizenship certificate. A student visa to go to Canada was canceled three days before he was due to leave. His application to study in France—made on his Russian passport—was rejected. Visa applications were also rejected by the United Kingdom, Spain, the Czech Republic, Australia, and Hong Kong. He launched legal action to try to get Canadian citizenship, the country to which he felt he belonged. “I am essentially exiled,” he has said.

  His brother Timothy felt out of place in Russia and wanted to leave the country. In September 2011 he went to London to study at the Cass Business School. He applied to renew his Canadian passport and was informed he needed to receive a citizenship certificate. He was then told that he was not entitled to one because his parents had been working in Canada as employees of a foreign government at the time of his birth. He was also told he needed a new name and became Timofey Vavilov. “I feel I have lost touch with my previous self,” he said. He found Russia difficult. “I have felt out of place and a foreigner,” he testified. Like his brother, he said he felt Canadian and fought in court for the right to live there.

  Timothy continued to dispute the claim he had been groomed to take over from his parents. “These allegations are not true. It has been stated by the FBI that for over 10 years my home was bugged, however no evidence of my involvement has ever been presented. . . . I do not have any knowledge of ‘sensitive information’ related to my parents or their work as they have not divulged any information to me,” he stated in an affidavit for the court cases. The boys’ relationship with their grandparents remained confused. “We don’t have a very close relationship,” said Elena’s mother nearly a decade after the swap. “They are polite, of course, and accept us. The elder one is a little more gentle. But the younger one . . . His mother tells him to call, talk, congratulate us sometimes, and he replies that for him the grandparents are strangers.”

  THE FATE OF the Murphys’ two daughters, younger than the Foley boys, preyed on the mind of some of the FBI agents. “I think about their kids a lot,” says Maria Ricci. “We watched them literally grow up. I hope they are okay. I really do.” It would have been far more bewildering at their age to be ripped out of their surroundings, but perhaps the lack of adult understanding may have made it easier and led to less questioning of their parents’ choices. A friend of eleven-year-old Katie received an email from her in Russia, a brief attempt to keep in touch and reclaim some normality. The smart, well-behaved kids who sang “God Bless America” were technically American citizens since they were born in the United States. Could they come back to America one day as adults? And how would the United States and the FBI view them? As innocents who had been lied to by their parents? Or potentially the next generation of illegals? A decade later, the girls have been able to move on and build new lives as young women, lives that reflect their international upbringing, one of them studying in Europe and able to speak five languages.

  VICKY PELAEZ HAD been deported to a country she had never before set foot in, with a husband whose real name she says she never knew. She could not speak the language and found it hard to cope with the separation from her children. She wanted to return to Latin America. Her husband, too, it was reported, made clear he wanted to go to Peru to live as Juan Lazaro. “He doesn’t want to stay in Russia,” his American lawyer, Genesis Peduto, said just a few weeks after the swap. “He says he’s Juan Lazaro and he’s not from Russia and doesn’t speak Russian. He wants to be where his wife is going, to her native country, where it will be easier for Juan Jr. to visit,” the lawyer said, adding that Lazaro put his family first. This again had always been the concern for Russian illegals who did not marry another illegal—that the bonds of marriage and children would supplant those of patriotic duty.

  Pelaez says for the first few months she struggled to adapt to her realization that her husband was not who he had said he was. Half a year after the swap, they were still living together and discussing it all the time, Pelaez admitting she had used some “very strong words” that hurt him at times. She maintained she was “collateral damage” in the spy game between the United States and Russia and had never known of her husband’s activities. Pelaez went back to Peru in 2011 for her father’s funeral and later that year, after an investigation into the use of false documents was dropped, Lazaro received a new Peruvian passport and they both moved there.

  IN A BRIGHT red jacket, Anna Chapman smiled and waved as she saw off a group of cosmonauts heading to the International Space Station. Chapman had the most colorful life following the swap. She had already become a tabloid sensation in Russia as well as the United Kingdom and United States before she had arrived back home. But she soon became something more. Her first public appearance in October 2010 at a Russian space launch caused a stir. Her next outing was more revealing. A few days later she posed nearly naked and wielding a gun in a photo shoot for Russia’s Maxim men’s magazine. But there was also a more serious side. She was given a senior role in the Young Guard—the youth wing of Putin’s One Russia party. There was talk for a while that she might go into politics.

  She made her first TV appearance in December on a talk show in which her patriotism was stressed, even though she spoke fondly of her time in the United States and Britain. The next month she was fronting her own show—Mysteries of the World with Anna Chapman. “I will reveal all secrets,” she promised in a red and black evening dress, but the only secrets of the first program were about a baby in the North Caucasus with skin marks said to look like Koranic verses. She built her brand with the same gusto she had displayed years earlier, launching her own website, which focused on her charity work rather than her former life in the West.

  Chapman had become a perfect symbol, as Russia commentator Edward Lucas puts it, of the “sleazy glitz” of modern Russia, in which sex, spying, business, and politics collide. She had taken the decades-old Soviet cult of the spy and illegal but then added on the trimmings of post-Soviet Russia, with its love of outward displays of wealth and glamour and a splash of nationalism to make up for the passing of ideology. She made a perfect feminine counterpart to a KGB officer turned president who liked to appear with his shirt off to emphasize his masculinity. They were supposed to represent vitality, vigor, and national pride. The cult of the spy had been reborn for a new TV age. It is said that each country gets the spies it deserves. If so, modern Russia would perhaps have a fusion of Anna Chapman and Vladimir Putin.

  BACK IN BRITAIN, her ex-husband, Alex Chapman, would be interviewed by MI5 to see what they could learn about his ex-wife’s past. There was
a brief flurry of interest in the racier details of his marriage as the young man did his best to make sense of what had happened to the girl in the white dress he had meet at a rave eight years earlier. Anna’s friends in Russia hit back when he started talking about how she had changed. “She quickly became disappointed in Alex and understood that he was not a man but a rag,” one said when explaining why they had broken up. But while his former wife would go on to become a tabloid sensation and TV star, Alex Chapman did not fare so well. In 2016, aged just thirty-six, he died of a drug overdose.