It isn’t just the CIA that sends spies to the Kennedy School; foreign intelligence services, whether allied or hostile, also covet access to future leaders. Russia, in particular, “has intensified its activity in the U.S. under Putin,” says Kennedy School administrator Sergei Konoplyov. “It might send people for short executive education courses. It’s cheap, there’s no suspicion. The person comes from Alfa Bank in Moscow, makes friends, hands out lots of business cards, and continues the relationship afterwards. ‘Maybe you come to Moscow?’”
The Kennedy School is typically informed of the U.S. agents who enroll undercover, but not of their foreign equivalents. Rumors, though, run rampant: a favorite pastime might be called “Guess the Spy.” One year, a student from the British government attracted speculation. A mid-career tradition is that students introduce themselves to classmates in fifteen wacky seconds, taking an awkward stab at cheerleading or opera singing. The presentations used to be videotaped, a practice since discontinued. Displaying the renowned British reserve, the official refused to participate.
“He was super-convincing,” recalls a former school administrator. “I thought he was going to have a breakdown. I wasn’t surprised when, months later, somebody came by and said, ‘I’m pretty sure he’s in MI6.’”
By contrast, “Heathfield” fit in well with his class, which included future Mexican president Felipe Calderón. An energetic networker, he led Canadian students on a Scotch-tasting excursion, which they christened “the Royal Canadian Scotch Stagger,” and organized a spring tour of wine caves in France. He struck classmates as “a flavorful conversationalist,” “very friendly, but also somewhat mysterious,” and “always very vague about his career ambitions.”
After graduation, he attended Kennedy School reunions and visited classmates around the world, ostensibly to keep up friendships. More likely, he was nurturing informants. “In Singapore, in Jakarta—he knew what everyone was doing,” one said. “If you wanted to know where anybody was at, Don would know.”
He also hobnobbed with professors and pundits at World Future Society meetings, and started a software design firm to help governments predict trends. Assigned by Moscow to gather information on “Western estimation” of Russian foreign policy, and on U.S. policy on topics from Central Asia to terrorists’ use of the Internet, Heathfield chatted up a George Washington University professor who had served as a national security aide to then–vice president Al Gore. A federal planner for nuclear weapons development told Heathfield about bunker-busting warheads that Congress had recently authorized.
His wife, Elena Vavilova, posed as a Canadian named Tracey Lee Ann Foley, and worked for a real estate firm in Somerville, adjacent to Cambridge. Russian intelligence had trained them both in espionage techniques such as invisible writing and steganography, or embedding messages in digital photographs. For two years until their arrest, their older son, Timothy, attended the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. Located across from State Department headquarters, the school prepares students for foreign-service and intelligence careers. The Wall Street Journal reported that, before his parents were caught, Timothy had agreed to spy for Russia and go there for espionage training. Timothy and his parents have denied it.
The family spoke no Russian in its apartment near Harvard Square. “In order to win, we need to understand,” Bezrukov later explained. “In order to understand, we need to love. So you must love the country in which you work.” He added, “I like many of the features of the American people, such as optimism, resourcefulness, willingness to make necessary changes, the ability to fairly and quickly recognize and correct their mistakes.”
Arrested while celebrating Timothy’s twentieth birthday, Heathfield and Foley pleaded guilty to conspiracy to act as unregistered agents of a foreign government. The Kennedy School rescinded his degree. The precautions that Russia had taken to conceal Heathfield’s identity amused his former Kennedy School dean, Joseph Nye. After all, Bezrukov didn’t need to falsify his name and homeland to penetrate the mid-career program; a foreign-service cover would have sufficed, as it does for CIA agents.
“He could have signed up as a Russian student and found out the same information,” Nye told me. “I make friendships with a lot of foreign students all the time. Are some of them FSB [Russian counterintelligence]? Possibly. I must have shaken his hand.”
Although Timothy and his younger brother, Alexander, were born in Toronto, the Canadian government stripped them of their citizenship. Alexander challenged the ruling but a federal court upheld it in August 2015 on the grounds that his parents came to Canada as Russian spies, fraudulently obtaining citizenship and passports to “establish their legend,” or backstory.
Returning to Moscow in a spy swap, Bezrukov was hailed as a hero. He became an adviser to ex–intelligence officer Igor Sechin, who is President Vladimir Putin’s right-hand man and the chief executive of Rosneft, the state-controlled oil giant. Bezrukov’s wife, Vavilova, is an adviser at Norilsk Nickel, a Russian mining company, according to her LinkedIn page.
On his LinkedIn page, “Donald Heathfield aka Andrey Bezrukov” highlights his Kennedy School degree, without mentioning that it was revoked. He also lists a 1983 diploma in history from Tomsk State University in Russia that was nowhere to be seen on his mid-career program bio. It would have given him away.
* * *
SHORTLY AFTER BECOMING CIA director in September 2011, General David Petraeus visited the Manhattan office of billionaire precious metals investor Thomas S. Kaplan. They had lunch in a conference room adorned with backlit digital replicas of paintings out on loan from Kaplan’s private collection of Rembrandts, one of the largest in the world. Petraeus was impressed by the vibrant, colorful copies, barely distinguishable from the originals.
They talked first about the Middle East. Petraeus was the architect of the counterinsurgency strategy that helped stabilize a disintegrating Iraq, and Kaplan had a keen interest in the region. Then the general got down to business. He needed Kaplan’s help with a promising idea: sending spies to graduate school.
Petraeus, who has a master’s degree and doctorate from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School, favored closer ties between the CIA and universities. He invited university professors to Langley to brief analysts on China and other topics, and then enjoy dinner with him afterward in the director’s dining room.
Clandestine officers, Petraeus thought, had fewer advanced degrees, and fewer opportunities for graduate education, than analysts. Between assignments, they could benefit from an academic year fine-tuned to their individual instructional needs, from languages to economics. Since there was always internal resistance to freeing up officers for training—“We’re famous for pulling people out of language school halfway through because of a new mission somewhere”—he would call them “Director’s Fellows,” to show he was pushing the program. They would go to the best schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and Johns Hopkins’s School of Advanced International Studies.
“The thinking was to provide them an opportunity to go off for a year and really to build intellectual capital for their future assignment,” Petraeus told me. “And then to enable them to have an out-of-your-intellectual-comfort-zone-experience. Such experiences have always been very important for me. When people have asked me, what enabled you to think out of the box the way you did the first year in Iraq as a division commander when we had the responsibilities of an occupying force and basically began to rebuild a nation after toppling its leadership, I often said that the biggest experience was graduate school.… For me, and for a lot of others I know, graduate school was tremendously formative. Among the takeaways for me was a very salutary experience with individuals who were exceedingly bright but saw the world through a very different lens.”
He also wanted the fellows to mix with other U.S. and international students. “We didn’t want them squirreled away by themselves,” he said. He didn’t expect any inappropri
ate recruiting. “They know the boundaries. You can have wonderful intellectual exchanges without trying to recruit somebody or exposing something sensitive.”
Trouble was, Petraeus didn’t have funding for the fellowships. Then he remembered Kaplan once telling him, “Let me know if you ever need anything.” Now he reminded the billionaire of his promise. Kaplan readily agreed to pay for the program, and reached out to their mutual friend, Graham Allison, director of the Kennedy School’s Belfer Center.
Allison, who has expanded the center into an empire of more than 150 faculty members, researchers, practitioners, and fellows, was glad to help the CIA. The trepidations expressed by Kennedy School administrators a quarter century earlier about collaborating with the CIA on the Intelligence and Policy Program had largely disappeared. While the ethical issues associated with enrolling spies, such as the use of false identities and the potential for covert recruiting, are valid concerns, they didn’t come up in early discussions about the fellowships, Petraeus told me.
In the program’s first year, two clandestine CIA officers had fellowships at Belfer. One was exactly the kind of candidate Petraeus had in mind; he had just left as chief of an important Middle Eastern station and was preparing for another key position in the region. Asked if the fellow used a cover, Petraeus said, “I know that some people at Harvard knew who he was. He probably was not declared, but I don’t recall.”
Engulfed in a scandal over allegedly providing classified information to a biographer with whom he was having an extramarital affair, Petraeus resigned as CIA director in November 2012. Although he talked to his successor, John Brennan, about the program during the transition, the agency’s interest in it quickly waned—much as its support for the Harvard Intelligence and Policy Program faded after Robert Gates left.
“It’s so difficult to break someone free for a year,” Petraeus told me. “It takes senior leadership that’s really committed to it. Your desires collide with reality, and the urgency of the moment, which is very real, crowds out such opportunities. We likely had new requirements in places like Syria and Iraq and others that one can imagine.”
Now called the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowships, the revamped program “educates the next generation of thought leaders in national and international intelligence,” according to the Belfer Center website. It caters primarily to analysts rather than spies: typically, two from U.S. intelligence agencies other than the CIA, and one each from France and Israel. They spend a year at the Belfer Center on research related to national security. In 2015–16, for instance, a Pentagon intelligence analyst studied “Transnational organized criminal networks that impact the economic stability and security of the U.S. and its allies,” while an Israeli military intelligence officer examined “Middle East regional dynamics and counterterrorism.”
Virtually no one at Harvard outside the Belfer Center appears to have heard of the Recanati-Kaplan program. Largely unstructured, it has no required courses or grades, and only recently began issuing certificates. Graham Allison himself is the “principal investigator,” or faculty adviser for the fellows’ research.
“No one’s undercover or lies about who they are,” Kevin Ryan told me. As the center’s director of defense and intelligence projects, he oversees the program. But “we don’t hang a sign on the wall saying they’re from the intelligence community.”
While the Kennedy School insisted on full editorial control over the Intelligence and Policy Program case studies, it has been willing to cede authority over the Recanati-Kaplan fellows’ research. In some cases, Ryan said, fellows have submitted their papers to their agencies for prepublication review. In other instances, they have asked him to omit their authorship. Since the center doesn’t publish anonymous work, “we keep it in-house.”
Petraeus meets with the fellows at least once a year. “It’s always great fun to compare notes with them,” he said. So does Kaplan. At one such session, the billionaire rambled on about his charity, Panthera, which protects imperiled big cats such as tigers, lions, jaguars, and leopards and their habitats, and boasted that he had foreseen Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, according to an attendee.
The partnership with France and Israel likely reflects Kaplan’s affinity for both countries—and their governments. Although born and raised in the United States, with a doctorate in history from Oxford, he is something of a Francophile. He learned French as a student in Switzerland, and two of his children were born in Paris.
At a March 2014 ceremony at Manhattan’s 92nd Street Y, France’s then-ambassador to the United States bestowed his country’s premier award on Kaplan, inducting him into the prestigious Legion of Honor, established by Napoleon in 1802. Before Petraeus, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Mark Wallace, and other luminaries, François Delattre pinned the insignia on Kaplan, who was natty as always in a three-piece suit and matching pocket square.
In a speech, Delattre hailed Kaplan’s services to France: dissuading the French government from selling the historic Fifth Avenue mansion that houses the embassy’s cultural services, by paying to install a bookstore there; loaning his Rembrandt collection to the Louvre; and creating the Kennedy School fellowships.
“The program has brought France together with the United States and Israel, which I much appreciate, the three countries together, in order to improve intelligence analysis and cooperation,” Delattre said.
Like Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Kaplan strongly opposed the Obama administration’s deal with Iran. The son-in-law of Israeli investor Leon Recanati, Kaplan has been a key backer of United Against Nuclear Iran (UANI), an advocacy group that includes former intelligence chiefs of Israel, Germany, and the United Kingdom on its advisory board.
UANI sought to pressure companies to stop doing business with Iran by exposing their violations of the sanctions then in place. “As much as United Against Nuclear Iran may not have had Tomahawk missiles and aircraft carriers at its disposal, we’ve done more to bring Iran to heel than any other private sector initiative and most public ones,” Kaplan said in 2014.
Proceedings in a lawsuit against UANI hinted at a covert relationship with U.S. intelligence. When a shipping magnate targeted by UANI sued for defamation, the Obama administration intervened, saying that disclosure of the group’s files could hurt national security. In March 2015, after reviewing classified declarations submitted by the U.S. government, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that “allowing the litigation to proceed would inevitably risk the disclosure of state secrets.”
* * *
GIFTS AND AWARDS from the military and espionage services of former Soviet-bloc countries adorn the third-floor office of Sergei Konoplyov, director of the Kennedy School’s Black Sea Security Program. They include medals from Ukrainian and Armenian intelligence, a plaque from the president of Romania, and an unopened bottle of champagne with Konoplyov’s photograph on the label. The inscription reads, “This sparkling wine was produced and bottled in the secret cellars of the Ministry of Defense of the Republic of Moldova in the honor of Mr. Sergei Konoplyov.”
A former Soviet military officer, Konoplyov was never a spy himself, he assured me—but so coyly that he seemed to enjoy being disbelieved. His alma mater, the Military Institute of Foreign Languages in Moscow, was a “nest of spies,” and he was eager to be recruited so he could shop at stores closed to ordinary Russians, but somehow Soviet intelligence overlooked him.
He wants to write a book titled “From the KGB to the KSG,” he jokes. “If I were working for the Russian government, I would be a perfect asset. I know everyone, including the Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter. There are a lot of sources here at the Kennedy School.”
After the Soviet Union collapsed, he worked in Ukraine and at the Eurasia Foundation, which fostered private enterprise and democracy in the newly independent states. He was a mid-career student in 1996–97 and has stayed at the Kennedy School ever since, running executive education progra
ms for military and intelligence officials of former Soviet-bloc countries. Some take place in Cambridge, others in Eastern Europe. In 2015, for instance, Harvard cosponsored a five-day program in Bucharest with the Romanian Intelligence Service on “Security in the Black Sea Region: Shared Challenges, Sustainable Future.” Konoplyov spoke at the opening ceremony, and Tad Oelstrom participated in a panel discussion on “Framing border(less) perspectives in the Black Sea region: Human vs. national vs. transnational security.” About half of the seventy attendees were Romanian intelligence officers.
Konoplyov’s programs provide a neutral back channel for resolving emergencies and disputes in the region. In 2005, a desperate phone call from a Russian admiral to an American counterpart whom he had met the year before at the Kennedy School prompted the United States and Britain to rescue a Russian submarine tangled in fishing nets in the depths of the Pacific Ocean.
In 2009, Romania exposed a Ukrainian spy ring and expelled its military attaché, testing the friendship that the heads of the two countries’ intelligence services had formed at—where else?—the Kennedy School.
“Why didn’t you tell me first?” the Ukrainian asked the Romanian, according to Konoplyov. “The president called and I feel bad.”
They quarreled and the Romanian said to Konoplyov, “I won’t talk to Ukrainians. They aren’t reliable.”
So Konoplyov invited the same Ukrainian and a different Romanian to an executive education program and told them to communicate. At first, the Ukrainian refused. But by the end, Konoplyov says, “I saw them sitting in Dunkin’ Donuts and talking.”
* * *
ONE KENNEDY SCHOOL classmate saw through Ken Moskow’s cover. An Arizona real estate developer and lawyer who served in naval aviation during the Vietnam War, Richard Shaw also had worked in foreign counterintelligence. When they first met, Moskow told Shaw that he was a foreign-service officer. “I said, because I have some background myself, ‘Let’s put that crap aside. We both know who you really work for,’” Shaw recalls. “He kind of looked shocked. We proceeded on, and were good friends and business partners.”
Spy Schools Page 30
