Russians Among Us

by Gordon Corera

  ANNA CHAPMAN ALSO had one more role to play nearly a year after she returned. That was in the trial of the man who betrayed her.

  Alexander Poteyev may have been on trial, but he was not physically there—just a ghost in the courtroom. The trial took place largely in secret at a Moscow District Military Court, behind large locked doors with a guard at the entrance. A panel of three judges heard the evidence collected by the FSB. Poteyev was accused—in absentia—of high treason and desertion. Only the final verdict was in public. A few veterans of the SVR turned up for the moment when Poteyev was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison and stripped of the rank of colonel and all his state awards. The star witness was Anna Chapman, whose written testimony was read in court. She said she was sure Poteyev had turned her and the others in. She said only a small group would have known about their activities. She identified Poteyev by photo. She also said that the special password that the undercover FBI agent “Roman” had used was one that was in her personnel file at Moscow Center that Poteyev had access to.

  The realization they had been betrayed by a colleague cut deep. “We didn’t much like Poteyev himself as a person,” Elena Vavilova said later. “For this person, money became more important than serving his country.” What would the illegals say to the man who betrayed them? “He had a choice. He made his choice. He should judge himself,” she said. Her husband felt the same. “I would not say anything,” Bezrukov said when asked. “In my opinion, he will be rotten for the rest of his life. Betrayal, like an ulcer, if it is in you, it will eat you up. . . . His father was a Hero of the Soviet Union. He betrayed not only himself—he destroyed the memory of his parents.” Bezrukov said that his personal impression of his fellow spy had been of a “weak” professional. He may have been welcomed by the CIA and FBI at first, but in the long run they would suck him dry and no longer need him. “Like a squeezed lemon,” said Bezrukov. He could barely contain his anger at a man who had negated more than two decades of sacrifice working undercover.

  “It was no coincidence that Dante placed traitors in the ninth and last circle of hell,” SVR head Fradkov said a few months after Poteyev had fled. The message was more direct from others. “We know who and where he is. Either he betrayed them for money, or else they simply caught him at something or other. But you need have no doubt—they have already sent Mercader after him,” one “high-ranking employee” of the Kremlin said—Ramon Mercader was the agent who murdered Leon Trotsky with an icepick in Mexico after he had fled Stalin’s Russia. “This man’s fate is not enviable. All his life he will drag it behind him, and every day he will fear retribution.”

  IN DECEMBER 2010, Putin took part in one of his regular TV appearances where members of the public could ask questions. Someone emailed in about the swap: “When speaking about the recent spy scandals, you said that traitors don’t live long. As we know from memoirs, the leaders of many countries signed orders to eliminate traitors abroad. The French and the Israelis did it. As head of state, did you ever have to take such decisions?” Putin’s reply was long. During Stalin’s time, there had been “special groups” to eliminate traitors. But these were now out of service. Russia no longer maintained such a practice, he explained. “As for traitors, they will drop dead without any assistance because . . .” He paused for a moment. “Well, take the recent spy scandal, in which a group of our undercover agents was betrayed. They were officers, you understand? And the traitor exposed his friends—his comrades in arms whose lives were dedicated to serving their homeland. Just imagine what it means to speak a foreign language as a native tongue, to give up one’s relatives and not even be able to attend their funerals. Think about it! A person spends his life serving the homeland, and then some bastard betrays him. How can he live after that? How can he look into the eyes of his children, the swine? No matter what gains a traitor receives for his malice, thirty silver pieces or what have you, he will never derive any pleasure from them. Spending the rest of your life in hiding, unable to talk with your near and dear ones—the person who chooses such a fate for himself will regret it a thousand times over.”

  The claim that Russia did not kill was a lie. Only four years earlier, Alexander Litvinenko had been murdered in London. But of course, Putin had to maintain that line. What was more telling was the length of his answer and his intensity. Even Russian journalists used to Putin’s coarse language noted that talk about swine was unusually brutal. It reflected a deep personal anger. Vladimir Putin was not done with traitors. Nor with America.

  24

  Still Among Us

  IT WAS EARLY evening, the day after the FBI swooped down on the illegals in suburban America, and a New Zealander called Henry Frith was walking down the street in Madrid. A stranger came up to him. This was no chance encounter.

  “Have you got just a few minutes to chat with me?” the stranger asked in a British accent.

  “I’m sorry,” Frith replied.

  “I think it’s very important that you do,” the Briton continued. “I have here in my hand your life. . . . If we do not talk now then I’m afraid there’s going to be a big problem for you here in Spain. . . . I work for Western special services, and you work for the Russian special services. I know this is a shock and I’m sorry that I have to do this on the street, but it was the only way I could get to talk to you securely.”

  The Briton worked for MI6. This was a staged confrontation planned back in London at MI6 headquarters at Vauxhall Cross. As he kept talking, Frith, the supposed New Zealander, kept saying “You’re wrong” and “no.” The Briton made one final pitch. Become a double agent against the Russians, he offered. “I have the opportunity to make your life a lot, lot better” was the promise. But there was also a threat. “The Spanish authorities are going to come, the police are going to come, there’s going to be a big scandal, and your whole life is going to be in ruins.” It was a stark choice. Leave behind the life he was enjoying and go back home with his cover blown and career over. Or maintain his comfortable life in the West, always looking over his shoulder.

  Henry Frith took a pass on the offer and walked away. Early the next morning he rushed to the airport. He was never seen again.

  Frith was another illegal. The real Henry Frith had been born in New Zealand in November 1936 and died a year or two later. The boy had been tombstoned by Directorate S to create a legend for an illegal called Sergei Cherapanov, supposedly born in Ecuador in 1957 (with a New Zealand father and Ecuadorian mother). Cherapanov is thought to have used an encrypted laptop to write messages before copying them onto a secure USB, which he then left in dead-letter boxes that Russian diplomats would clear. One of those diplomats was pictured pretending to urinate by the side of the road while actually taking something from under a rock. He was most likely running agents in Eastern Europe or the Balkans from his Spanish base.

  Cherapanov was identified thanks to Poteyev—hence the need for the fast pitch the next day. It is thought that Cherapanov had been under watch for some time, perhaps as much as a year—just one of the leads provided by Poteyev that the CIA had tried to mask as it passed details to allies. When Poteyev fled, the SVR would have realized that Poteyev could have blown some of these names. Fearing they could be withdrawn, the British decided to move fast. Spanish intelligence was aware of the case as well, but it was agreed that it would be better for MI6 to make the pitch. This was sometimes the case with Russians in Spain (like Sergei Skripal years earlier). There was no attempt to reel Frith in carefully or test his motivations. It was a fast and dirty pitch, but it was also a no-lose situation. “You win the gold medal if he works for you,” one former British spy explains. “But you still get the bronze if he buggers off.”

  THE CURTAIN HAD been lifted on Russian illegals thanks to Poteyev, one British counterintelligence official at the time recalls, and suddenly you had a view of what had been going on. This, another spy explains, offered a whole series of “direct opportunities” such as the one in Madrid. In the Unit
ed Kingdom itself, they could see the travel of illegals through the country although none was based there. In other cases, there would be the chance to make a move.

  The operation that busted the American illegals rippled out widely. “It obviously rang a lot of bells around the world,” says Leon Panetta, CIA director at the time. There was disruption to the SVR’s global network of illegals. One US source claims that as many as sixty illegals around the world were identified. A Russian report after Poteyev’s trial claimed he had blown eighty undercover agents and an entire communications infrastructure that had cost $600 million, making it the largest failure in the SVR’s history. The German security service said that in the decade after 2006, the EU and NATO uncovered twenty illegals working for Russian intelligence (although it is not clear if this includes the ten in Ghost Stories). But relatively few cases have come to light. In some instances the United States told a country they had an illegal operating within their borders, but, the country was too worried about causing a row with the Russians to do anything. They—like others—may have decided to watch an illegal rather than pounce to see what they could learn. In other cases, of course, an illegal may have been approached, but, unlike Henry Frith, decided to take the offer and turn into a double agent. That is another reason why the details are kept secret. In many cases Poteyev may have provided leads—nuggets of information about someone he overheard—that were useful to work on but not necessarily conclusive evidence. A decade after the Ghost Stories swoop, one Western counterintelligence source says that threads are still being pulled. But the months immediately after the arrests would reveal two facts: first, that the illegals program was under pressure; second, that it was still going but evolving.

  BLACK-CLAD OFFICERS FROM Germany’s elite GSG 9 police special forces team crept into the small house in Marburg in October 2011. It was early morning but their target was already awake. On the top floor the officers burst into a room to find Heidrun Anschlag busily working a shortwave radio transmitter. On the other end of the line was Moscow Center. Heidrun was so startled that she literally fell off her chair.

  Heidrun, forty-six, and her husband Andreas, a fifty-two-year-old engineer, were long-term illegals with globetrotting backstories (and the confused accents to match). In 1984 a lawyer registered Andreas Anschlag as an Austrian born in Argentina in 1959. The fake birth certificate (along with a Mexican driver’s license) all came from Directorate S’s forgers. A local official is believed to have been bribed a few hundred dollars to make sure everything went through. Heidrun had apparently been born in Peru a few years later. They had been selected as a couple and may have tied the knot a second time to get her an Austrian passport. In the same way that Canada was the jumping-off point for the United States, Austria was for their target of Germany, where they arrived in 1988 in the dying days of the Cold War.

  The case was a perfect example of the damage that could be done by illegals if they were not under control in the way those in the United States had been by the FBI. Andreas worked in the automotive industry and traveled abroad frequently—including to the United States, Spain, Portugal, the Czech Republic, and Brazil. He joined policy groups and think tanks and attended conferences on transatlantic relations security. There, like Heathfield and Murphy, he would suggest targets for the SVR from the people he was meeting—including politicians, government officials, and people linked to the intelligence services who were then targeted by the SVR. The couple received about 100,000 euros a year from the SVR.

  As well as scouting for potential targets, the couple also ran agents themselves. A Dutch Foreign Office official, Raymond Poeteray, provided them with sensitive documents about NATO and the EU. He had come back from a posting in Hong Kong (where on their departure he and his wife dumped a Korean girl they had adopted) and found himself in debt and living above his means. Andreas Anschlag drove to Holland once a month on Saturdays to exchange documents on a USB stick for money—close to $100,000. “He also passed on sensitive information about colleagues to the SVR, such as their sexual orientation and possible health issues,” a court was later told of Poeteray. All perfect for the SVR to work out who else they might be able to subvert.

  The device Heidrun Anschlag had been caught using was a high-tech piece of equipment with an antenna hidden in the lining of a laptop bag. The bag held a high-frequency transmitter that sent messages to one of a half dozen or so Russian satellites circling above. On Tuesdays at 6 p.m. Heidrun would plug a decoder into a shortwave receiver. A red light would indicate a satellite was coming into position and a blue light indicated a message was being transmitted securely. The couple had attended a training course in Russia on the decoding program called “Sepal” and an encoding program called “Parabola.” They would inform Moscow that material was waiting in dead drops. Line N officers would head out and empty them.

  YouTube’s platform provided another novel way of communicating. The couple and the SVR created accounts a month apart in early 2011, which commented on videos, mainly about the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo. “It’s a very nice video and the song is also very good,” they wrote. This was answered by the SVR account, called Cristianofootballer, saying, “He runs and plays like the devil.” This, German investigators believe, was a means of communicating by hiding in plain sight amid all the noise on the world’s largest video platform. The comments included a sequence of punctuation marks that could be turned into numbers, which would then refer back to a pre-agreed message. This was the next step on from the famous number stations—public radio broadcasts to spies and illegals in code that have been used by the Russians (as well as other countries) for decades and can still be heard.

  A tip-off that came from both the Austrians and the Americans led the Germans to the Anschlags. The Russians seem to have been aware an investigation was closing in—perhaps because they were sensitive after Poteyev’s arrest—leading to discussions about returning to Moscow. The SVR was concerned about communications equipment falling into Western hands. Knowing that time was running out, the Germans moved in October 2011. The Anschlags served relatively short prison sentences after an initial attempt at another swap—for a CIA agent in Russia—fell apart. Their daughter became another person who suddenly realized she had Russian parents.

  ONE CONNECTION IN these cases is that Poteyev may have been able to tell the United States about the use of Latin American cover identities. That would also link to a Belgian investigation launched in 2010. A man claimed to be born in Uruguay of a Belgian father and British mother, the identity stolen from a British child who died young. His wife was supposedly born in Ecuador to a Belgian father and Ecuadorian mother. Their identities had been created between 1990 and 1992, when their names were inserted into the Belgian population register. The man later requested a passport at the Belgian consulate in Rome, the woman in Casablanca. A Belgian consul in Morocco was accused of having been recruited, including through a relationship with an SVR agent, to approve false identity documents (part of a network of consuls compromised by Moscow). The couple moved to Belgium and had children. Belgium, home to the EU and NATO, has long been a prime target for Russia’s spies, and the pair were busy making contacts and passing back information before they went to Italy and then disappeared.

  MI5 SUFFERED ONE bruising experience in the United Kingdom immediately after the Ghost Stories arrests, involving a young Russian woman who was inevitably compared to Anna Chapman. On August 8, 2010, a month or so after Chapman hit the news, Ekaterina Zatuliveter was stopped at Gatwick airport. MI5 officers took her to a nearby hotel for the first in a series of interviews. A few weeks later a sensational headline hit the British press: “MI5 quizzes MP’s aide on spy links.” Zatuliveter worked for a member of Parliament who had previously sat on the Defence Select Committee. “MI5 made its move weeks after a Russian spy ring was uncovered trying to infiltrate policy makers and financial circles in the US. Security sources confirmed that the intelligence agency is investigating whether ‘s
leeper cells’ are also active in Britain,” it was reported at the time. In December the government moved to deport Zatuliveter on the basis she was a threat to national security.

  Zatuliveter was born in the North Caucasus and studied at St. Petersburg University. MI5’s assessment claimed that the FSB and SVR had a substantial presence at the university, including at the School of International Relations, where she studied in order to monitor foreign students and recruit Russian nationals. During her time in Russia she had a brief relationship with a Dutch diplomat based in Moscow. She also met Mike Hancock, an MP with an interest in Russia, during a parliamentary visit in 2006 when she acted as a chaperone for delegates. He invited her back to his hotel room but she refused. But a sexual relationship began the following month. She then came to the United Kingdom to study and eventually began working for Hancock in Parliament. Next, in 2010, she met a fifty-year-old official who held a significant position with NATO in Moscow. Zatuliveter engaged in a series of flirtatious texts with him that eventually led to an affair. “The Security Service assesses that Zatuliveter’s sexual involvement with two significantly older men with access to sensitive material and influential positions is consistent with the activities of an agent working for the RIS (Russian Intelligence Services),” MI5 formally concluded. The view of MI5 was that she was an agent rather than an illegal or officer, most likely recruited before she came to the United Kingdom. “I am not suggesting that in this case there was a honey trap in terms of their being an entrapment in order to embarrass or blackmail. The point that is being made here is that the Russian intelligence services still use sexual relationships as part of their operations,” an MI5 officer said in evidence. “Our case is that the beginning of their relationship may well have been directed by the Russian intelligence services,” they said of her and Hancock, while conceding there could have been genuine feelings as well.