RUSSIANS AMONG US

Sleeper Cells, Ghost Stories and the Hunt for Putin’s Agents

Gordon Corera

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2019

Copyright © Gordon Corera 2020

Cover image © Arcangel / Paul Gooney

Gordon Corera asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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Source ISBN: 9780008318932

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780008318956

Version: 2020-01-27

Dedication

For Jane

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Introduction

1: Three Days in August

2: The Birth of an Illegal

3: Strangers in a Strange Land

4: “Karla”

5: Undercover

6: The Source

7: The Investigation

8: Breaking and Entering

9: Putin’s Spy Fever

10: Targeting

11: Enter Anna

12: The Spectre

13: Moscow Rules

14: The Controller

15: Murphy Steps Up

16: Anna Takes Manhattan

17: Closing In

18: Decision Time

19: Escape

20: The Day It Ends

21: The Squeeze

22: Vienna

23: Anger

24: Still Among Us

25: A New Conflict

26: The New Illegals

27: The New Ways

28: Revenge

Picture Section

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Gordon Corera

About the Publisher

Prologue

IT WAS HUMID enough for haze to rise off the tarmac as fourteen people crossed paths for a few brief moments at Vienna airport on July 9, 2010. The fourteen—all accused of being spies—were changing planes but also exchanging lives.

Ten were going one way. They had been living secretly undercover in America’s suburbs, and they were now on their way to Russia.

AMONG THEM WERE a KGB-trained husband and wife from Boston who had stolen the identities of dead Canadian babies and whose own children were now sitting bewildered in Moscow. A New Jersey couple whose grumpy husband had made way for his wife to take the lead in their joint spy venture. Her success in getting close to power had set off alarm bells in Washington. Another pair had moved from Seattle to America’s capital to further their spying career. But as with the others, almost every moment of their life in America had been owned by the FBI. The last of the four couples was the oddest: a retired Russian spy and his Peruvian wife. She claimed she had not even known her husband’s real name despite decades of marriage.

Then there was a young man who had not stolen anyone’s identity but had fallen into an FBI trap while he was working his way into Washington’s circles of power—the trajectory of a new breed of spy. And last, but not least, there was the twenty-something redhead who would gather tabloid attention thanks to a party lifestyle in Manhattan and London and nude pictures splashed over the papers (pictures she had spent the plane ride complaining to the FBI about).

All ten had been betrayed by a man they had known and trusted and who days earlier had made a dramatic escape from Moscow to the West.

Arriving on a plane from Moscow and heading in the other direction were four Russian men. Two of them—bound for America—were still feeling the effects of the beatings they had been subjected to in the previous days. One had helped catch a traitor in the CIA and the agency had been desperate to get him out for years. The other had played a role in catching a traitor in the FBI but his subsequent fate was the cause of regret in the CIA. Two other Russians were heading for Britain. One was a sullen figure, angry at being forced to confess to being a spy when he said he had never been one. He was the source of guilt for Britain’s MI6. The last man, a tough former paratrooper, really had been a spy for MI6. Eight years after the Vienna swap, his former colleagues in Russian military intelligence would smear a deadly nerve agent on his front-door handle, spiraling relations between Russia and the West into an even darker place than anyone would have imagined that sunny July day.

WATCHING THE TWO groups closely was a small group of intelligence officers from the West and Russia. Many had spent their entire professional careers battling each other in the shadows. Now they were just yards apart. For years, even within their own intelligence bureaucracies they had been regarded as dinosaurs—ageing prizefighters still throwing punches at each other in the ring even though the crowd had long departed. One of the Russians in particular had devoted much of the past quarter of a century to entangling his adversaries in a web of deceit. His American adversaries thought that at long last they had the better of him. In Vienna, one side seemed to have won, the other to have lost. But that only made sense if you thought this was the end. It was not.

That evening Vice President Joe Biden appeared on The Tonight Show on American TV. The spy swap was the talk of the town. “Do we have any spies that hot?” Jay Leno asked Biden, referring, inevitably, to the redheaded woman sent back to Moscow. “Let me be clear—it wasn’t my idea to send her back,” Biden said to laughter. That was true. He was one of those who had opposed the plan to arrest the Russians and engineer a swap but had been overruled after a heated debate in the White House Situation Room. His comments fit in with a deliberate strategy from Washington to play down the significance of what had just taken place in Vienna—to treat it as an inconsequential event. And for the world watching it all seemed like some kind of bizarre retro-throwback, a hangover from the past, a last hurrah of people who could not quite let go of the Cold War. That was a mistake.

Introduction

THIS IS A book about ghosts. The ghosts of spies past have haunted relations between Russia and the West even as the Cold War ended. The Cold War was fought through espionage and defined by it in the public mind. But when that conflict suddenly ended, the spying did not stop. Repeated cycles of treachery and the hunt for those responsible were an obsession for a small band of spies and spy-catchers on both sides. Neither could let go. And this obsession mattered, since the spy wars have continued to shape relations between the two sides over the decades, playing their role in the rise of Vladimir Putin and his drive for revenge.

Ghost Stories was also the code name of the decade-long FBI investigation into Russians living under deep cover as sleepers in America. It was a fitting title, since these were people who had been resurrected from the dead in graveyards as part of Russia’s “illegals” program. The story of these spies and those who pursued them is told here for the first time in detail but set against the broader story of espionage between Russia and the West. A confession: I was one of those reporting on the events surrounding the Vienna swap who thought it was all a bit peculiar. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and this book sets out to explain why those events were not just the last echoes of the past but also foreshadowed a darker future. The scene at the Vienna airport offered a snapshot of a normally hidden Russian intelligence program, and the blinding flash of publicity illuminated both the tail end of a program running from deep in the Cold War and the beginnings of a new Russian strategy that would replace it.

One veteran of the CIA shakes his head in awe as he ponders how his old adversary has the mind-set to send people to live as “sleepers” in another country for decades, patiently burrowing into the heart of their target, waiting for years to act. This was evidence of the Russians’ persistence and patience in targeting its adversary—qualities that have not always been appreciated. Meanwhile, on the Western side, the focus on Russia from the end of the Cold War onward has been hazy and erratic.

As a result, the illegals arrested in 2010 were portrayed as something of an oddity and certainly not dangerous. “They successfully infiltrated neighborhoods, cocktail parties and the PTA,” one of their lawyers said, mocking the charges his client faced. This was a narrative deliberately reinforced at the time by the US administration, which was in the middle of an effort to reset relations with Russia. Seeing Russian spies either as figures of fun or as all-powerful is a mistake. The reality was that the illegals were involved in building networks and putting down roots that could have resulted in long-term damage. A previous generation of Russian illegals in the 1930s and 1940s had played a key role in helping steal American atomic secrets and eating away at the heart of British intelligence from the inside. There was real risk from their work and their mission reveals much about how Moscow sees—and sometimes misunderstands—the West.

But they were also people. There are complex personal stories at the heart of this tale. Imagine being a child brought up in suburban America, pledging allegiance at school and running lemonade stalls for your neighbors, but then coming home one day from a pool party to find the FBI all over your house. And then being informed that your parents were not Americans but Russians. And then two weeks later being on a plane to Moscow. It is no wonder that the work of the illegals became the inspiration for The Americans, a TV drama set in the eighties. And the real-life spies are sometimes more extraordinary than those of fiction.

The ghost-stories roundup of 2010 illustrates the pivot in Russian espionage that was taking place and changes that were not appreciated at the time. “The Western world can’t bring itself to believe to what extent it is transparent and vulnerable to Russian illegal intelligence,” a person who worked inside Russia’s top secret illegals directorate argues. Moscow has long sought to exploit that openness but the way it does so has changed. The end of the Cold War did not end the illegals program, but the new interconnectedness of the 1990s and then the post-9/11 era have changed the way it goes about it. That led to a new breed of spy, Anna Chapman being one example. This is not our parents’ Cold War.

Vladimir Putin is a practitioner of the martial art of judo. It allows a weaker opponent to defeat a stronger adversary. Rather than confront that opponent head-on, the trick is to leverage their strength to throw them off balance. That is what Russia has done with the West. Using the West’s openness was at the heart of the illegals program, but the Kremlin’s judo has evolved since 2010 as the internet and social media have offered new opportunities. The internet’s fundamental features make it a perfect place for those who want to obscure or hide their identity—opening the way for what I call the new “cyber illegals.”

One reason the 2010 illegals story was downplayed was that the Russian spies did not get hold of classified information. But this was another mistake. What if spies are not after secrets but influence? The Kremlin’s agents have learned to marshal espionage, influence operations, and use technology in a novel way as they engage in a conflict with the West that for many years went unrecognized.

These changes were slow to be appreciated in the West, partly a result of the deliberate playing down of the events in 2010 and partly because of the continued hold of a Cold War mind-set. This is a story that matters not just because of what it tells us about Russian and Western espionage but also because of its consequences and repercussions. The pain and humiliation of the defeat in 2010 would not be forgotten in Moscow. It left scars on Putin personally. Russia’s leader, who worked with the illegals program as a young KGB officer, has risen to power and cemented his hold on it thanks to a story he told his people about spies and treachery. Revenge for that humiliation would come served in a bottle of perfume eight years later and in a new campaign unleashed against the West by the Kremlin. Russia is now barely out of the news. But that also has risks.

THE CIA’S APPRENTICE spies who have been chosen to operate in Moscow are given an extra level of training on how to spot the surveillance teams that will be following them. Identifying the tiny telltale signs that suggest the woman in the shop or jogger on the street is not just a member of the public but actually a Russian surveillance operative takes an extra degree of preparation required from anywhere else. After a training mission out on the streets, the students report back to their instructors on which of the people they thought were really watchers. But some trainees become so hyperaware they get it wrong, believing that ordinary people are in fact operatives trailing them. These false positives are known as “ghosts.” A form of paranoia is always a risk for those who work in intelligence. It can also apply to nations as well. Russia and the West have sometimes seen “ghosts”—the hidden hand of the other side when it is not there, especially now. Trying to distinguish between the apparition and the real is difficult but a clearheaded appreciation is vital to avoid the dangers of miscalculation.

The aim of this book is not to demonize Russian spies, let alone all Russians. It is a mistake to not try to understand how the world looks from inside the Kremlin. A mind-set that Russia is a besieged fortress under subversive attack from the West—and particularly the CIA and MI6—has played an important role in justifying Moscow’s actions. Spying is supposed to illuminate the other side’s intentions, but it can also increase tension and drive conflict. This book is based on interviews with dozens of intelligence officers in London, Moscow, Washington, and elsewhere, including some who have served as illegals. Many have worked at the front lines and in most cases they spoke anonymously, but their accounts help explain how we got to where we are today.

It is tempting to talk about a “new Cold War.” That conflict is long gone. There is a new one that is being fought today with both old techniques, like illegals, and new ones. And the best place to start this story is at the moment that the last conflict ended.

1

Three Days in August
August 18, 1991

THE SMALL BAND of Western spies operating in Moscow had learned to trust their instincts. And that Sunday afternoon some of them could sense something strange in the air. For CIA and MI6 officers working undercover in the capital of the Soviet Union, the shadow of the all-powerful KGB was everywhere. It was on the streets and in their bedrooms, black cars trailing them, eyes watching them, microphones listening in. They had received the most intense training that their agencies offered in order to survive in the belly of the beast—the bleak and unforgiving capital of their adversary. CIA officers would walk the streets continually so they knew every crossroads and alley better than those in their hometowns. That was so that when the moment came to “go black” and lose a tail they might have a shot. The phrase “Moscow Rules” referred to this highest level of tradecraft—or spy skills—required to contact Russian agents who were providing secrets to you. There was no room for error, since one mistake might mean leading your KGB tail to them. You would be expelled. They could end up dead.

The MI6 station was smaller than its American counterpart—only a handful of officers. The head of the station had been a special forces officer and he liked to run. One benefit was that it let him stretch his surveillance team. Perhaps you might be able to lose them for a second or two in order to drop a package off or pick it up. In order to keep pace, the KGB assigned an Olympic runner to stay on his heels. That worked until the MI6 man, running on the outskirts of town, decided to jump into the Moscow River and swim across just to annoy his surveillance team. But late that Sunday afternoon there was a mystery. When the youngest member of the MI6 station went for his regular run in a nearby park, he could see the usual surveillance was there as he began. But then, as he became increasingly breathless in the summer heat, he realized the surveillance had vanished. No watchers. No parked car. That had never happened before. Catching foreign spies was the KGB’s priority. What could have been so important that they were called away?

The mystery was solved the next morning when the spies turned on the radio. Hard-liners were seizing power in a coup. The country’s leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had been progressively opening the country up, had been detained in the Crimea. Some of the KGB’s best surveillance teams—normally reserved to follow foreign spies—must have been pulled back to deal with events. The KGB was the sword and the shield of the Soviet state. The bulk of its half-million personnel were devoted to internal security; its mind-set was the constant search for enemies who threatened the grip of the Communist Party. The chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Kryuchkov, feared Gorbachev’s reforms were undermining the pillars on which the Soviet Union had been built, leaving it at risk of collapse, and he was one of the plotters. That Monday morning, columns of tanks made their way across the capital, scattered amid the usual morning traffic as people returned from the weekend. But there was something tentative about the move; the soldiers seemed unsure how to act. The CIA’s chief of station, David Rolph, had only arrived three months earlier from Berlin (“at least I’m going somewhere stable,” he told colleagues) and now found himself in the middle of a crisis no one had predicted. He told his officers to fan out across the city and find out what was going on.

In the place known as “the Woods” or, more formally, as “Moscow Center,” elite KGB officers watched with surprise from the window as the endless column of tanks trundled toward the city center. Yasenevo is set among trees half a mile from Moscow’s outer ring road. From 1972 it has been home to spies whose job it is to steal secrets around the world—then known as the KGB’s First Chief Directorate. Past the barbed wire and guard dogs sits a gray 22-story building set in a park by a lake. Most of the staff was shuttled in every morning in anonymous buses but the most senior generals were housed on-site in a compound of dachas.

At the moment the coup began, the man in charge of the First Chief Directorate had been playing tennis at Yasenevo. That was because Leonid Shebarshin was not one of the plotters. A few weeks earlier, Shebarshin had stood next to KGB chairman Kryuchkov as they addressed the new political leaders—men like Boris Yeltsin, who had just been elected president of Russia by popular vote. Russia was still part of the Soviet Union. But the control that the center exerted over its empire was crumbling as republics—including Russia itself—were flexing against the Communist Party that ruled over them. Shebarshin sensed that day that the politicians were more interested in their own power struggles than the warning he was there to deliver about the “main enemy”—the United States. “What was not changed was the ambition of the US to weaken the Soviet Union and deprive it of the status of a great power,” he told his restless audience. Washington’s “new world order” meant American dominance. The Cold War had not really been an ideological struggle, he believed. It was really about Western resistance to the idea of Russia as a great power. Shebarshin’s worldview had surprisingly little to do with communism. As that faded, what remained was a resilient core of nationalism. The Soviet Union covered nearly a sixth of the world’s surface. But size was also weakness. Western spies had been supporting separatist forces trying to fray the bonds of the USSR, Shebarshin explained. He was frustrated that no one seemed to be listening. But he had not realized how far the man next to him would go. A few weeks later, the KGB chairman and other hard-liners feared a treaty that was about to be signed would break up the USSR and so launched their coup. Now, from his spacious office in Yasenevo, Shebarshin watched on Monday morning as the tanks rolled into the city. But they stopped at red traffic lights. That hardly looked ruthless. The spymaster was hanging back—not committing either way. Ironically, the man in charge of the KGB’s international espionage operations then turned on CNN to find out what was happening in his own country.

Thousands of miles away on that same Monday in August, there was proof that Shebarshin’s First Chief Directorate was still in the game. An American intelligence officer went for a walk to a park only a few miles from the headquarters of the CIA in Virginia. He liked Mondays as he knew there were fewer FBI surveillance teams operating. Underneath a footbridge he left a package containing highly classified information about intelligence operations the United States was mounting against the Soviet Union. He retrieved another package containing twenty thousand dollars in cash and a message. He was one of two spies the KGB had deep inside its opponent’s intelligence services. This spy had been active for more than a decade but not even the KGB knew his real name. And the pair were not the only spies the KGB had in America—they also had their own officers, living as sleepers.

HIGH IN YASENEVO’S tower, those who controlled the KGB’s most prized spies had also been watching the tanks. Floors fourteen to twenty on the main tower were home to Directorate S. Its work was kept secret even from other colleagues in the building because this was where the KGB ran deep-cover agents who lived abroad under false identities—illegals. Traditional spies work under diplomatic cover in a foreign country—posing as something like a second counselor for trade. If such a spy is caught, they have diplomatic immunity and can only be expelled. Other spies work under nondiplomatic cover, as, say, a businessman. They have no diplomatic immunity. In the Russian terminology, they are “illegal.” Many countries undertake this kind of spying but Directorate S takes things a step further. A deep-cover Russian illegal can be not just operating under cover of a different occupation but can take on an entirely different nationality. The Russian will not—to all appearances—be Russian but instead be German or Canadian or even American. They can spend decades undercover in a different country, burrowing deep into their target society—sleepers. Some will live and die in a foreign land, buried in a graveyard under a name that was never truly their own. Illegals are the pride of Soviet and then Russian intelligence—having assets deep inside enemy territory provided a sense of power and reassurance and an edge over their adversaries. Were they worth the vast investment? “My experience tells me that this practise quite justified itself,” Leonid Shebarshin said.

When the 1991 coup began, a legendary figure made a surprise reappearance in the corridors of Directorate S. Yuri Drozdov had retired a few months earlier as the head of the directorate. But in August as the tanks rolled, he returned to the duty room, with a sparkle in his eye. “We’ll restore order in the country! We’ll clear up the mess. It’s about time!” he told surprised staff. Lean, with a long face, Drozdov had entered Berlin with the Red Army at the end of World War II and by 1962 was a KGB illegal in Germany. Drozdov escorted American lawyer James Donovan across East Berlin to organize one of the most famous spy swaps of the Cold War, when the illegal Rudolf Abel was exchanged for captured American U2 pilot Gary Powers. He then spent four years in New York before in 1979 becoming head of Directorate S, where he ran the illegals for more than a decade. But in his final months in charge, he had found the uncertainty and confusion surrounding the Soviet Union deeply unsettling.

The illegals around the world had become agitated as they watched news of the political divisions and disarray back home. These men and women had dedicated their lives to an idea that communism would transform the world. But what if that was now disintegrating? At an operational meeting before his retirement Drozdov had revealed the depth of their concern. A few illegals, he said, had broken every rule and written directly to him asking what was going on. “Personal letters are being written to me,” he told his astonished subordinates. “They ask what is happening in our motherland. They say they can’t understand anything! They ask who it is they are working for. Is it for the Soviet Union or for Russia? For the Communists or for the ‘new democrats’?” He explained that the illegals feared that the new political leaders might betray them. Some said they would not maintain contact with the center for their own safety until the situation was resolved. They would continue with their long-term missions but avoid short-term scheduled contacts. “I have received not just one letter like this but several,” an exasperated Drozdov explained. “What have they been doing? Have they held their own Party congress?” he joked.

The illegals were the glory of the KGB. Drozdov’s greatest nightmare was that this intelligence capability—so prized and so patiently built—could be lost. He was sufficiently worried that he began destroying some of the documentation so it could not fall into the wrong hands. Fear may have driven him to back the August coup. But Drozdov’s return, like the coup itself, would be short-lived.

Out in the city, the CIA officers sent out by their chief of station began reporting back. They realized their KGB minders were absent and so for the first time, they took the risk of meeting contacts quickly on street corners without the usual careful preparation. They visited the airport and TV stations—all the places you would seize first in a well-planned coup. But no one had secured them. The whole thing was starting to look like something a group of desperate men had cooked up quickly after too many vodkas rather than a well-oiled operation. Crowds of ordinary people were taking to the streets as a light drizzle fell. Barricades were going up. The plotters had failed to arrest Boris Yeltsin and he would become the focal point of opposition. After decades of the tightest control, everything seemed to be unraveling at bewildering speed. The CIA officers could see the army waver. The coup was a last, desperate attempt to prevent the demise of the communist system. Instead the plotters had hastened its death. Gorbachev flew back to Moscow to reassert control. The plotters were arrested. But the chaos did not end as the state seemed to unravel.

Shebarshin was summoned to see Gorbachev. He was offered the temporary chairmanship of the KGB. As he walked out of the meeting, he could hear protesters outside. He knew what a revolution sounded like from his time in Iran in 1979. He took an underground tunnel to the Lubyanka in central Moscow—the imposing headquarters of the KGB. It was eerily quiet inside. As the light faded, Shebarshin could see Dzerzhinsky Square out of the window. After the 1917 revolution Felix Dzerzhinsky had led the Cheka. Its mission had been to use whatever means necessary to preserve the hold of the Communist Party against domestic and foreign counterrevolutionary forces. Dzerzhinsky led a “Red Terror” in which countless were killed and yet the KGB had built a cult of personality around him. To this day his successors—who portray themselves as guardians of the state battling against subversion—are known as “Chekists.”

That August evening protesters gathered around the ten-ton statue of Dzerzhinsky in the square. For them it was the symbol of oppression. There were excited speeches and slogans, an air of the impossible suddenly becoming possible. The crowds maneuvered a crane into place. “Death to the KGB,” some shouted. There was at least one undercover CIA officer among the crowd. Despite the suspicions of the KGB that they were manipulating events, the Western spies in Moscow were doing no more than observing, astonished as history unfolded before their eyes. Shebarshin forced himself to watch from a fifth-floor window as Dzerzhinsky was taken firmly by the neck. The man who had overseen countless summary executions remained expressionless as he prepared for his own. His iron legs seemed to give one last shudder and then he toppled. A man in a white shirt stood on the empty pedestal and shook his fist triumphantly in the air. For the crowd it was a moment that signified the end of the old order. The KGB was dead. Wasn’t it? In the early hours of the morning, a few KGB officers snuck out of the Lubyanka and left a message on the empty pedestal. “Dear Felix, we are sorry that we couldn’t save you. But you will remain with us.”

The next day, staff inside KGB headquarters were ordered to seal the doors. Knowledge is power for a spy service, and for the KGB it resided in its files that listed the names of informers and agents at home and abroad. These had to be protected at all costs. When East Germany had seen its revolution in 1989, the offices of its security service, the Stasi, had been overrun. There had been frantic shredding of documents. In Dresden, a young KGB officer on his first foreign posting had watched in fear as the crowds gathered outside his office. He had dreamed of joining the KGB since he was a teenager. He called a Red Army tank unit to ask for protection. He expected them to crush the protests, but they explained they were still awaiting orders. “Moscow is silent,” he was informed. He was shocked. It was time to destroy the files. “I personally burned a huge amount of material,” the KGB officer later recalled. “We burned so much stuff that the furnace burst.” That officer’s name was Vladimir Putin. He would never forget what happened when crowds rose up and Moscow was silent.

In August 1991, the KGB in Moscow feared the same fate as the Stasi. Shebarshin opened his safe and pulled out incriminating papers so they could be destroyed. He also took out his service pistol—a Makarov 9-millimeter semiautomatic. He carefully oiled and cleaned it. He gave the order to ship files out to a secure location. Shebarshin was then informed that his time as head of the KGB would be only a single day. Gorbachev returned him to head of the First Chief Directorate and installed a liberal reformer as his superior, with a mission to break up the KGB.

Thousands of miles away, in Langley, Virginia, the cables from their team on the ground were being pored over for every detail. No one in the CIA had seen the coup coming and now their opponent was down. But were they out?

“Their dicks are in the dirt,” the head of the CIA’s Soviet division, Milt Bearden, used to tell his staff. Bearden was a straight-talking Texan with a swagger to match who was head of the CIA’s Soviet and Eastern Europe division. The division was the powerhouse of the agency. Its inner sanctum would become known as “Russia House”—a reference, like so much in the spy world, to a John le Carré novel. But at the moment of triumph, it was a house divided. Many officers had spent their entire career having been working against the Soviet target, but Bearden was an outsider, his last job running operations in Afghanistan. That meant he was viewed with suspicion by the insiders. There were deep divisions over how to deal with the old enemy. Bearden’s view was that times had changed and that liaison—sitting down with the other side’s spies—offered new opportunities. That view was met with deep resistance from those who thought it was naive to think their adversary was changing. The “insular subculture didn’t want to let go of the Cold War,” Bearden would later write of his critics; “it had been too much fun.” Over the decades to come, and even as it moved away from the center of CIA operations, Russia House would always retain its own unique identity, its work sealed off from everyone else behind walls of secrecy. Its critics would say it was trapped in the past, but inside its walls, its inhabitants believed they were the only ones who understood that, whatever changed on the surface, the opponent they faced off against was patient, persistent, and aggressive, and only they fully appreciated the danger. At the time of the coup they thought Bearden did not get it.

As the coup collapsed, Bearden summoned one of his officers into his spacious office. Mike Sulick was a Bronx-born former marine who had served in Vietnam and had a PhD in Russian studies. He joined the CIA in 1980 and had already done one undercover tour in Moscow. He would eventually rise to be the head of the CIA’s clandestine service and a central figure in the intelligence war with Russia, one of the key players in the Vienna spy swap. Sulick that day had his bags packed to head off to Lithuania, one of the Baltic states that had sought independence from the USSR, in order to make contact with their intelligence service. “As I entered Bearden’s office, he eased back into his chair, propped his leather cowboy boots up on his oak desk, and broke the news: ‘Sorry, trip’s off, young man,’ ” Sulick later wrote. Then Bearden broke into a grin. “But look at it this way. It’s not every day the president puts you on hold,” he explained. The White House had delayed Sulick’s trip while they worked out whether or not to recognize the Baltic states. A few days later Sulick was allowed to travel to meet the Lithuanian spies. Once there, he walked around the local KGB office, a grand building that had been stormed while the coup had been taking place in Moscow. It was littered with documents half burnt and shredded by frantic KGB officers a few days earlier. A portrait of Dzerzhinsky had been slashed with a knife by the protesters who had forced their way in. Sulick went down into the grim, dark cellar in which prisoners had once been tortured in tiny cells. There was even a padded, soundproofed room for those sent mad by their punishment. “The empty cells still seemed faintly to echo the screams of tortured prisoners,” Sulick later remembered. He felt a tightness in his chest, an inability to breathe, and he could only stay inside for a few moments. This was the type of memory that stayed with those who battled against Russia in the spy wars and made them determined never to relent.

A few days later Bearden was in Moscow and sat across from the new, reformist head of the KGB. The KGB chief explained he wanted to end the Cold War mind-set. Too much effort and money had been wasted, for example, by putting listening devices into the new US embassy. Bearden slipped the US ambassador a note: “Ask him to give you the blueprints.” To the amazement of the Americans, the new KGB chief would soon hand over not just the plans but some of the actual transmitters that had been buried inside the American embassy being built in Moscow. Bearden took it as proof that his new ways of liaison might bear fruit. The KGB chief hoped the Americans would reciprocate with details of their bugging operations on Soviet missions in Washington and New York. He would be disappointed.

The handover of the plans by their new boss stunned the hardened operatives of the KGB. They thought it was madness. “How naïve to believe the fall of the Soviet Union meant foreign intelligence would no longer be needed,” thought one officer who had battled America. The KGB’s old guard, like those in the CIA’s Russia House, were not yet ready to give up the game even if their bosses were sitting down together. And their dicks were not quite in the dirt as much as it looked. One thing the KGB had not revealed was that even as their country fell apart, they had a pair of aces up their sleeve—two spies in the heart of American intelligence. But the reforms were too much for some. Shebarshin resigned soon after. “The Soviet Union is no more but eternal Russia remains. It is weakened and disorganised but the spirit of the Russian people has not been broken,” he wrote.

By the end of that year, republics including the Baltics had their independence, Gorbachev was gone, and the Soviet Union was formally dissolved. And so was the KGB, broken up in early December, to reduce the concentration of power. The old First Chief Directorate—the sword—became the SVR, with the task of spying abroad. Even though his statue had been torn down outside, inside the Lubyanka, Dzerzhinsky’s picture was still up on the walls, and small statues stood in rooms and corridors like shrines. The domestic security arm of the KGB—the shield—would go through various names in the coming years before eventually becoming the FSB. The names changed and the organizations underwent a crisis of morale in the following years. But what was preserved among a small cadre of KGB officers was a mind-set—the one that Shebarshin had articulated in 1991, in which Russian nationalism supplanted communism and in which spies had a duty to preserve the state to protect the motherland. That would be passed on to a new generation and when Shebarshin, decades later and in ill health, shot himself in his Moscow apartment using his ceremonial pistol, he would be living in a country run by one of his former KGB officers.

The KGB was dead. But it would rise again as something else. Only a few people understood that less had changed than at first sight. They included the small group of Western spies operating in Moscow at the time of the coup. In August 1991, their respite from surveillance had not lasted long. Precisely three days after vanishing in the park on a Sunday afternoon, the young MI6 officer’s minders from the KGB were back on his tail as if nothing had happened. The game went on.

On December 26, 1991, a married couple sat in a hotel room in Buffalo. They watched on CNN as the flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time and they wept. The pair, with a newborn son to look after, were far away from home. He used the name Donald Heathfield. She was Ann Foley. The trauma they had felt over the last few months as they watched their country collapse had to be buried deep down and internalized. Ann had developed a nasty skin inflammation. It baffled the doctors since it seemed stress-related in origin. And yet on the outside she gave off the impression of a young woman without a care in the world. The couple had to hide their reaction to events in Moscow because they were KGB sleepers living under deep cover in Canada, pretending to be Canadians. Their long-term target was the KGB’s “main adversary.” But now the regime they had served and sworn an oath to was gone, along with the KGB that had trained them. Some illegals would use this moment to disappear, discarding their true selves and melting into the West as their adopted selves. But this couple chose to continue with their mission. They told themselves that their country—Russia—still retained their loyalty. “For me, my country is more than just a government or a certain political arrangement. I was serving my country, my Motherland,” Ann says. But as they watched the ceremony dissolving the Soviet Union and cried, they felt alone. What was their future now?

2

The Birth of an Illegal

DONALD HEATHFIELD, LIKE his wife, had been born in a cemetery, a ghost rising from the dead. A baby boy had been born on February 4, 1962, in Canada, the third of four children of Howard and Shirley. Six weeks later, on March 23, Shirley found little Donald lying still, a tiny arm sticking out of the side of his crib. Her child had died. Tracey Lee Ann Foley was born on September 14, 1962, in Montreal, the first child of Edward and Pauline Foley. Seven weeks old and just a few days after she had smiled at her mother for the first time, she developed a fever. Within hours, she died of meningitis. As with the Heathfields, the pain of the loss of a child so young never left the family.

But then a quarter of a century later, Heathfield and Foley were suddenly there again, brought back to life by Directorate S.

The twin tragedies had not gone unnoticed. A KGB officer serving in Canada had observed them. He would steal something from these two families who had already lost something irreplaceable—their children’s identities. KGB officers had the macabre job of strolling around cemeteries looking at graves for likely candidates, a process known as “tombstoning.” The ideal situation was a child who died away from the country in which they were born, with few close relatives, reducing the documentary and witness trail to the death. Once a candidate was found, the next step might be to destroy any documentary evidence of the death. This could be as simple as bribing someone for access to a church registry book and then ripping out the pages. Then came the key—requesting a new birth certificate (a technique that relied on there being no central registry of births and deaths). “It was considered a big success for us when Department 2 managed to obtain children’s birth certificates after a whole family died in a traffic or other kind of accident,” explains one former member of Directorate S. A birth certificate meant a child could be born again as an illegal.

Directorate S was broken up into departments. Department 2 was the storytellers. Their job was to create a fictional life and to make it plausible enough to stand up to scrutiny from a discerning critic by building “legends” and providing backstories. Officers of the department would draw up paragraphs in two columns. On one side would be the supposed detail of a person’s life—Donald Heathfield was Canadian and born in Montreal. On the other side would be the made-up evidence supporting that claim—starting with a birth certificate. If there was a claim that did not have documentation, then there would be a plausible story why. It was painstaking work. If there was any doubt, an entire identity would be discarded. Roughly one in ten attempts would create something considered sustainable against checks by Western security services. Each illegal had a “kurator”—literally a curator of the false identity who would supervise their training and act as a handler once they were in the field.

The Operational Technical section of Department 2 includes a team of highly skilled forgers. What does a French passport issued five years ago look like? What does a Finnish driver’s license look like? They study which inks, papers, glues, and even staples are used in target countries so they can be faked or—if blanks can be stolen—doctored with a new identity inserted. A laboratory works on how to replicate the different types of paper and ink and how to artificially age a document in a special oven so a passport can be filled with the backstory of visas and trips and made to look old when it is in fact new. So why not just create entirely fake personas for the spies? A proper check into someone’s background would raise too many questions and if fake documents are spotted then it is game over. For long-term penetration, the strong preference was always to get hold of real documents rather than rely on fakes. This meant becoming a “dead double”—stealing an identity of someone deceased and then using it to build a set of genuine documents. That was the route for Heathfield and Foley. They might arrive in Canada and start with a birth certificate. This could be used as the stepping-stone to contact public bodies and obtain other identity documents. Ultimately this would eventually lead you to a real passport, helping create what was called an “iron legend.”

So who was the resurrected Donald Heathfield? His real name was Andrey Bezrukov. He was born on August 30, 1960, in Kansk, in remote Siberia, a small town near the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway, home to a MiG fighter base. His parents were often away for work and so he was an independent child, self-contained with a strong inner confidence. Bezrukov traces his family tree back to the Russian conquest of Siberia under Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century, when his distant relatives had first come to the region. “For me to forget this is to be left with nothing,” he later said. Remembering your roots was important when you were pretending to be someone else. Patriotism would sustain him in his long years far away from home.

In 1978, at the age of eighteen, Bezrukov went to Tomsk State University. His study of history gave him a sense of the uniqueness of Russia’s story, a country engaged in what he calls an “endless, painful search for herself between East and West.” And it was while a student that he was talent-spotted. Universities are the classic recruiting ground for illegals. Department 3 of Directorate S is in charge of the intense selection process. An ideal candidate is in their early twenties. When a person was younger than that you could not be sure they had what it took to survive. By thirty, they were no longer malleable enough to be shaped into a new person. Spotters looked for those who might have the right set of skills—an aptitude for languages was vital, so was intelligence, patience, adaptability, an ability to cope with stress, and a sense of patriotism. Careful psychological assessments were undertaken. Someone who was volatile or looked like they might drink too much or have too much of an eye for the opposite sex was not suitable. This was all initially done at a distance before a move was made—perhaps, as often in the West, on the recommendation of a professor. Somewhere among the stream of students carrying books to and from class and flirting with each other, the KGB had spotted Bezrukov.

Bezrukov was not recruited alone. The fact that illegals were selected in their twenties posed a problem—relationships. An illegal was destined to spend decades living undercover. It was unrealistic to think they would not engage in relationships. But this posed a danger. If you fell for a local, you would either have to constantly try to hide the truth from them or risk telling them you were not who you said you were. Worse, you might place love over duty and give up your spying career. Anatoli Rudenko, a 1960s illegal, worked in West Germany and London before ending up in the United States as a piano tuner to the rich and powerful—including the governor of New York, Nelson Rockefeller. Rudenko’s career ended when he was forced to reveal he had defied orders by secretly marrying a hairdresser in Germany and taking her with him. Plans to use him to penetrate the United Nations and think tanks—including by seducing lonely young women—had to be shelved. It was an example of why human relationships were the key to an illegal prospering or failing.

And so the preference became to send out couples. Marriages were sometimes arranged and manufactured by Directorate S (its officials could even officiate in order to maintain secrecy). An arranged marriage would not just avoid the danger of falling in love but also offer a partner in undercover work. “You would not have to waste your time chasing after girls and risk falling into bed with the wrong one,” one illegal was told during the Cold War when a partner was offered to him. “You would not have to explain your absences … [Y]our partner would be a trained agent who could help with communications, photography, drops—with everything. You would not be alone behind the lines.” Not all marriages worked. Yelena Borisnovna and Dimitry Olshevsky were sent to Canada under the identity of two dead babies, Laurie and Ian Lambert. Their relationship hit the rocks out in the field. Dimitry moved in with a local woman, while Yelena began to date a British-born doctor. Canadian intelligence arrested them in 1996. The pair were deported, landing on a stormy night in Moscow to be whisked away in a blacked-out van straight from the runway.

Andrey Bezrukov’s marriage, though, was no fake. This was an adventure that two young people set out on together. Elena Vavilova was a fellow history student at the university. She had been born in November 1962 in Tomsk, where her parents were academics. She was a cheerful, outgoing child who enjoyed figure skating, ballet, and acting. At university she played the violin as she studied for her degree. There she met Bezrukov. There was a confidence to him and also a sense he might take her out of the well-ordered world she had grown up in. “Andrey offered me something out of the ordinary, an adventure,” she later said. The young couple spent the night together in the university library, sneaking in before closing time and staying among the book-lined shelves. But they were caught by the director the next morning. There was a telling off but no punishment. Perhaps it was this spirit of adventure and the willingness to take risks together that got them noticed.

The young couple was approached by a man who had an unusual proposal. Did they want to serve their country? She was only twenty-one. “I wondered what would happen to our relationship,” Vavilova thought. “I believe we were selected separately, each of us could have refused the proposal,” Vavilova later explained to me. “However, since we were already romantically involved, it was more beneficial to have us as a couple for the training.” She would later reflect that love marriages among illegals were better than arranged ones because of the trust that was always there. Their first curator sat down with them and in long conversations began to see if they were suitable—their recruiter talked to them about their backgrounds, their lives, their friendships, and their studies, carefully probing them to make sure they had what it took. The strains of the life they were to live drove others apart but, in their case, it would bring them even closer together.

Why did Elena Vavilova agree to become a spy? “The concept of the Motherland—an amalgamation of everything that is important to you,” was her explanation later. Vavilova and Bezrukov were still living in the era of communism when they were approached by the KGB, but it was always as much defending Mother Russia as spreading communism that had motivated them. “For me the main motive that made me agree and accept this job was the desire to prevent another terrible war, like the Great Patriotic War,” Vavilova later said, using the Russian name for World War II. “As a teenager, all the films about the war and the suffering the people had to go through and the high price we had to pay for victory, all of this fostered in me a wish to be part of whatever could be done to prevent it from happening again.” This was the driving force for many Russian spies from the Cold War generation—the sense of threat to their country and the story of their near defeat at the hands of the Nazis before a victory that came at an enormous cost (one which many feel is rarely acknowledged in the West). Almost every family had lost someone in that brutal war. The illegals’ mission was to prevent it happening again by acting as a warning system. The early eighties, when the couple was approached, were years when the need for such warning seemed all too real. In Washington, there was an American president calling the Soviet Union “the evil empire” and who, Moscow feared, might be gearing up for confrontation and perhaps even a first nuclear strike. And at the same time, young men from the Soviet Union, including fellow students from Tomsk, were heading off to fight in a brutal conflict in Afghanistan.

In the West, the word spy refers to both heroes—the James Bonds—and villains—traitors like the Kim Philbys. But in Russia they separate the two concepts with different words—a spy is a betrayer of secrets. Meanwhile, their word for heroic intelligence officers translates more closely in English to “scouts”—in the sense of someone who is working behind enemy lines to scout ahead and report back, providing advance warning. The separating of the two ideas makes it easier in Russia to lionize the heroes and demonize the villains. It also explains how the illegals saw themselves as operating behind enemy lines in order to protect the motherland. They were the “soldiers of the invisible front.”

Soon after, the couple was married. Bezrukov’s parents came to the modest reception in Elena’s parents’ house. A few years later they would be married for a second time, this time as Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley (she chose to use her new middle name rather than Tracey). “The gap between our weddings was short, a few years, but those years were very intense,” Vavilova later explained. There was no honeymoon the first time. Instead, Bezrukov and Vavilova simply vanished from the life of friends and family as they headed to Moscow. Despite the excitement of being in the nation’s capital and the luxury of a two-bedroom apartment, this period was challenging. “The years before we left were quite taxing physically, psychologically and intellectually,” she would say. By the end of every week, they would be exhausted. They had to learn all the traditional “tradecraft” involved in being a spy—out on the Moscow streets they practiced brush-pass contacts, where one person hands over items to another surreptitiously—and tested on whether they could spot surveillance. Inside, they learned martial arts, how to shoot a gun, and how to evade a polygraph lie-detector test. But there was much more to the creation of an illegal than attending regular spy school. For a start, the training was provided to them as a couple by a small group of tutors. They did not mix with other recruits to protect their identity. But it also involved going much deeper. Each illegal required a staggering investment—around four years and by some estimates a million dollars. This compares to CIA and MI6 training for new officers, which is measured in months, not years. “It was not a mass production,” one head of the KGB said. “You do not train illegals … in the classes. It’s a piecemeal operation. You work with an individual, one on one. And only in such a way, we can make them look like an Englishman or a Spaniard or a German.”

As the Moscow snows came and went, Bezrukov and Vavilova’s education involved former illegals educating them in the history of the elite spies whose ranks they were to join. Moscow had developed its specialty in illegals after the 1917 revolution. Many countries did not have diplomatic relations with the communist Soviet Union so diplomatic cover was not an option. In those early years, there had also been a pool of ideologically committed communists of various nationalities who were willing to spy for Moscow. This led to the heyday of the illegals in the 1930s and 1940s. Richard Sorge operated undercover in Japan, moving in the highest diplomatic circles to provide vital intelligence about Tokyo’s relationship with Nazi Germany. In Europe, illegals recruited people who were students and some would slowly work their way into positions of power and influence. Some, like Kim Philby and the Cambridge spies in the United Kingdom, would reach the highest echelons of Western intelligence agencies. In America, illegals worked with the atomic spies who stole the most sensitive secrets imaginable, which proved vital in allowing the Soviet Union to avoid defeat in the early Cold War. Many of these early international illegals were rewarded with execution in Stalin’s purges.

In the mid-1950s, the KGB began a push for a new generation of homegrown illegals. They never quite matched their predecessors, although there were some successes. Among the best known was Konon Molody, who turned into Canadian Gordon Lonsdale. He came to London and ran a spy ring stealing naval secrets. Molody had previously worked as an understudy in the United States for another of the great illegals—Rudolf Abel, a remarkably talented individual who had been born in Britain and served in World War II on the front lines before embedding himself in New York. These were the footsteps Bezrukov and Vavilova were to follow in.

The illegals were treated as heroes in the Soviet Union, far more than their spy counterparts in the United States or Britain. There were stories of their daring undercover operations in World War II. The most fabled was Nikolai Kuznetsov. Films and books were based on his time posing as a member of the German occupying army in Ukraine during which he killed six senior Nazis. The accounts of World War II illegals were a central part of Soviet popular culture promoted by the KGB. One fictional work was turned into a 1973 TV series called Seventeen Moments of Spring. It featured a deep-cover illegal, a Soviet version of James Bond, who posed as a German aristocrat to infiltrate the Nazi SS and who prevented the Nazis from negotiating a peace deal with America. The series was a massive hit, reaching up to 80 million viewers, and was constantly repeated, embedding itself in the popular mind. Vladimir Putin was twenty-one when the series was first shown and he became desperate to sign up for the KGB. One of his first jobs in East Germany in the 1980s, he would later boast, was to work with illegals.

The CIA and MI6 have never had quite the same capability. They do use what Britain calls natural cover and the Americans call non-official cover (NOC) for their spies. When someone is recruited as a CIA NOC (pronounced “knock”) every trace of their contact with the agency is obliterated. Sometimes these officers became annoyed because they had to give up their salary for the cover job, which exceeded their CIA pay even though they felt they had earned it by doing both jobs. They also often felt on the margins of the CIA. Occasionally an individual with a private sector background suddenly gets a surprisingly high-level job at Langley—the reason is they may have spent their career as a NOC. The closest the United States got to Russian “illegals” was the recruitment of dual nationals into its NOC program. So a French-American recruit might end up as a French businesswoman but actually be a CIA officer. But the United States and United Kingdom have never really repaid the favor of sending their own long-term agents into Russia posing as citizens of a third country for extended periods. Why? There is a simple answer. What CIA or MI6 officer at the start of their career would relish spending two or three decades in Russia? The advantage for Russia was always precisely its weakness during the Cold War and after. People from other countries—including undercover Russian spies—want to live in the West. People in the West are less likely to want to go the other way and spend two decades working in Volgograd pretending to be a Ukrainian. It also takes patience, sacrifice, and long-term thinking to create an illegal, something the KGB’s competitors were not always so good at.

What were illegals for? The simplest answer is that they were there to do the things that other spies could not. Konon Molody was used to run spies where it was feared that KGB officers under diplomatic cover might be spotted. Other illegals were used to gather specific types of intelligence—for instance, by being trained scientists who could infiltrate biological research establishments or analyze technical data from agents there. Others were deployed purely in case of war. If conflict did break out, then diplomatic relations would be cut and these illegals would take over the running of agents from embassy spies. Some sleepers—also called konservy, or “preserves”—were there purely to carry out acts of sabotage in the event of war. The scale of Soviet and later Russian investment can only be understood when you realize that some illegals were trained for years and then spent decades in their target countries and yet were never called on to do anything operationally. They were a sign that Moscow played the long game when it came to spying. But other illegals—like Bezrukov and Vavilova—were not “sleepers” in the sense that they were dormant, waiting to be activated. Rather, from the beginning of their deployment they were to be engaged in starting to work their way into Western society with the purpose of gathering intelligence.

An illegal could get deep into their opponent’s society in a way that a legal spy could not. That allowed you to understand your adversary and also meet people who would not engage with a Russian. Doing this required an actor’s talent, Bezrukov would later say. But an actor turns on his character for a performance and then returns to his normal self. That is not an option for an illegal. You had to become someone else—and never let that mask slip—and yet never lose your real self. Isolation was a constant worry. The illegal trainees were carefully observed, including by psychologists, to see if they would crack under the stress or if they could hold their cover. This was different from worrying if a secret agent would break under interrogation and torture. The stress instead would come from decades living in a foreign land. One person described the challenge as similar to training a flight crew of cosmonauts who were going to go out to space. The bonds between those out on a mission and those supervising them back home needed to be strong. A traitor among such a tight circle was almost unthinkable because of what it would mean. What Bezrukov could not have known was that at the very moment he was being trained in Moscow, the man whose fate would eventually determine his was undergoing his own training. A veteran of the Afghan war, Alexander Poteyev had been selected to attend the Red Banner Institute in Moscow—preparation to become a KGB intelligence officer.

Learning the language of their target countries took up the majority of Bezrukov and Vavilova’s day. They had teachers who had lived in the West but were also given videocassettes of films whose dialogue they would copy and learn. They had to push their own language back in their minds so that the first word they reached for was in their new tongues of English and French, even if they swore. It was not just language but lifestyle. You had to wear the clothes, eat the food, smoke the cigarettes, and even use the razor blades of the target country. “We trained authentic Americans and Englishmen on Soviet territory,” explained one head of the KGB. “Habits of how to fill out forms in a London post office; how to pay for an apartment in New York.” You had to listen to the radio, watch the TV, and read the newspapers while instructors—often defectors—would test you. When one illegal returned to Moscow, his boss spotted him at the airport in a restaurant, slowly eating his dinner with a knife and fork like a “prim Englishman”—even smoking a pipe as if he were back in England. Vavilova had to learn tiny details that might give you away—for instance, in America when you counted with your fingers you did not bend them like you did in Russia. She would also have to learn what she called the “peculiar American optimism,” which meant “keeping your face smiling.” No more dour Russian looks for her.

There is one fear that haunts Moscow Center. Could those undercover Russians take to their new lives a little too much and literally go native? During training, illegals were tested with dummy missions. They would be tasked with meeting an agent, but the real purpose was for the agent to report back on the prospective illegal. In some cases illegals were even given a truth drug. Bezrukov’s final test involved being given an attaché case with a false bottom containing, he assumed, drugs to hand over to someone he was told was a crime boss. It was supposed to be a straight handoff, but when he met the recipient, they forced him into a car. The case was empty and Bezrukov was subject to interrogation—with a gun pointed at him—to see if he could cope with the unexpected.

When the training was complete, Andrey Bezrukov was going to disappear. Before they were posted abroad in the late eighties, Bezrukov and Vavilov, now about to become Heathfield and Foley, like every illegal, had to swear an oath to the party, the homeland, and the Soviet people.

There was always trepidation, their spymasters would recall, as an illegal was finally dispatched. It was like sending a child out into the world. Drozdov was something of a father figure to the illegals in these years and would personally check on their progress. But now it was time to let them go. Another head of the directorate compared the moment to taking someone you had just taught to swim and sending them far out to sea. You did not know if they would have the strength to cover the long distance that lay in front of them.

As the moment arrived, Bezrukov and Vavilova sat in front of an empty suitcase in their Moscow apartment. All the clothes they would travel in had to be carefully purchased outside of Russia so that nothing could give them away. They had cleared out every pocket so there was nothing like a coin or ticket stub. Into a box they placed the mementos of their old life that would be left behind—their love letters, Communist Party membership cards, and even their weddings rings. These would be handed over to the KGB for safekeeping. But there was one thing that Elena Vavilova held in her hand that she could not let go of—some pictures of her childhood. They were her last connection to Tomsk and to the life she was saying good-bye to. Those would come with her. It was a mistake that would come back to haunt her.

What was the most difficult emotional experience in departing for a new life? The farewells to parents were hard (there was a cover story of going to Australia). But the real fear was never returning. “There was a possibility we would never come back. We even contemplated the possibility of dying there,” Vavilova later said. “Strangers in a strange land, under alias.” Bezrukov was haunted by the thought of the Canadian cemetery his false identity had been born in and the fear he might be buried far away from Mother Russia. The tombstone would simply read “Donald Heathfield.” If you were an illegal, even your death would be a lie. That was the life the young couple had committed to as they set out.

3

Strangers in a Strange land

THE MONUMENT WAS at a picturesque site in Canada, although neither the man nor the woman who met each other there will say precisely where it was. The pair were playing at being tourists and strangers. The woman walked down the steps. She stopped for a moment looking for something in her handbag. The man happened to be standing in front of her. In these situations, a camera could be your best weapon. “Good morning. May I take your picture? You look so good in the sunlight,” the man said. Yes, she replied, and they began to talk. It seemed like a chance encounter but, in reality, it was the opening scene in a movie whose script had already been written. As their legend would have it, this was where the pair’s romance began. But the truth was they were not strangers. Rather they were already a married couple. The encounter at the monument was the cover story for where and how Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley first met and how their relationship began.

THE PAIR HAD arrived separately in Canada in 1987, the Cold War still under way. There was excitement at the chance to prove themselves but also fear. The initial journey to a target country was a moment of high risk. There had to be no chance you could be traced back to Russia. So a journey might go first to Eastern Europe, and then to Cyprus, to the Middle East, to Asia, and finally to Canada, at each stage a different set of documents used and then discarded. For Ann Foley, the final entry into Canada was the moment of greatest fear. “You also have to keep your emotions in check, keep calm, not show you are flustered or afraid,” she later recalled. There should be no sudden movements or looking around. But she had nothing to worry about. The Canadian authorities still do not know what identity the pair arrived under or even the date they came into the country. Once the disposable identities had been tossed away, the illegals switched to their new settled identities. First they had to meet and then melt into their target society. Canada was a long-established stepping-off point (the “host” country in the center’s terminology) to prepare to reach the “target country.” At least four of the eleven ghosts who would be the target of the 2010 arrests would have some kind of Canadian documentation. Canada was the ideal launching pad for illegals into America. The culture and language allowed an illegal to acclimatize and build up their identity while border and document checks were largely ineffective. “Canada is a lot like the US, only colder and with fewer people,” a KGB officer explained to one illegal in the 1970s.

Heathfield and Foley’s mission was long-term penetration of the “main enemy.” But what is staggering is that they would spend more than a decade building up their cover before they actually went to live in the United States. That was how long Moscow Center was willing to wait. There was occasionally contact with Moscow Center as orders and money were sent, but their main job was to forget Russia and immerse themselves in Canada. Vavilova would observe other young women whom she saw on the street or met and then try to copy their gestures or their style of conversation. A job was vital partly as it started you on a career that would lead to contacts but also because you needed to explain where your money came from. Some illegals started a business (with money from Moscow); Heathfield had little help though. “I had to get an education again, look for work, create a business … without anyone’s help and with minimal resources,” he later said. In Montreal, Foley enrolled in a course at the Computer Institute of Canada and took a job in accounting at a garment factory. Heathfield worked in accounts at a Honda dealership. It just about covered the bills. They were tough years with long hours, the hard graft of being an illegal. They moved to Toronto and on June 27, 1990, they had their first son, Timothy.

“Every undercover agents’ family have to decide, whether to have children at all,” Foley would later say. “This is a difficult decision to take.” You were bringing a child into the world whose family was living a lie. This was a heavy responsibility and some illegals decided against it. “We carefully weighed this, of course, discussed a lot,” she later said, acknowledging that “our leaders also had concerns.” But it was something the couple had always wanted. They also knew that from the outside, they would look more “normal” if they had children. Even the act of childbirth has risks. In the famous drama about illegals, Seventeen Moments of Spring, an illegal gives away her identity by crying out in pain while giving birth. The problem was she had done it in Russian. When it came to her time, Vavilova as Ann Foley took extensive precautions, attending prenatal classes to learn how best to control herself. She refused anesthetics to keep a clear mind and made sure her husband was present in case anything went wrong.

The summer after the birth of their first child, the couple watched the coup in Moscow and then the collapse of the Soviet Union. The regime they had sworn an oath to was gone. Suddenly, they were on their own. But where some illegals may have given up, Heathfield and Foley did not. It was a “painful period,” Heathfield later acknowledged. “We could not receive support from the Center. We had to fend for our ourselves and cover all our expenses,” recalled Foley. A sense of patriotism endured even as the ideology they had sworn an oath to vanished. But there was also a sense of jeopardy, the knowledge that chaos in Russia risked their exposure. The end of the Soviet Union did not mean the end of the illegals or the desire of its intelligence services to spy on the West, though. Far from it. It was soon clear that the game went on.

A YOUNG COUPLE approached the immigration officer in Helsinki airport on April 23, 1992, and showed their British passports. The man’s name was James Tristan Peatfield, from Surrey. She was Anna Marie Nemeth, from Wembley. But the immigration officer was suspicious. They seemed nervous. They had just got off a flight from Moscow but only had hand luggage and did not speak very good English. Who had won the British general election a few days earlier? They did not know. When their bag was searched, around $30,000 in cash was found inside an old shirt as well as a shortwave radio. Nemeth had some story about having been in Canada and working in an advertising agency. That was news to the real Anna Nemeth, who worked at a suburban Sainsbury’s supermarket and was left bewildered when police arrived at her door. She had visited Hungary four years earlier, when her passport details must have been copied. She had never met the real Mr. Peatfield, who was from Coulsdon in Surrey. The couple at the airport next offered a cover story that they were trying to emigrate illegally and had purchased passports on the black market with money from selling women’s underwear. Having such a cover story at the ready—usually involving some murky criminality—is standard practice for an emergency situation. The British intelligence officers who interrogated them in Helsinki had some hope that the woman might admit the truth, but she never did. The pair were deported to Moscow. They were illegals who had used the British identities of “live doubles” on a training mission and their failure was subject to a detailed review back in Directorate S. What it told the West was that the flow of illegals had not halted despite the end of the KGB.

The end of the Cold War had not been a moment to relax for Directorate S. Rather it was a time to double down. The world was fluid and uncertain and that meant intelligence was more important than ever. In the first few months after the coup, even while the future of the whole KGB was uncertain, a decision was taken to increase the focus on illegals. “The world is not as safe as some people present it to be,” Leonid Shebarshin, head of the First Chief Directorate, explained soon after he retired. “So I think it would be a very safe measure and a good precaution to strengthen the illegal branch.”

The emphasis on illegals was part of a traumatic shift by the new SVR. In the early 1990s it was forced to cut its overseas network of officers operating under diplomatic cover by a third. The fact that relations with the West were improving offered new opportunities, though. In the Cold War, it was hard for Russians to get visas to the West. Now that commercial ties were growing, spies could be placed under cover in business ventures. And the openness also offered the chance to dispatch more illegals. “While favourable circumstances exist it is essential to utilize the repose to deploy to the West as many illegals as possible and to cultivate and recruit more special agents,” one member of the directorate, Alexander Kouzminov, later explained. It was almost as if, as everything else crumbled, the illegals became even more important. But they were about to be dealt a serious blow.

DRESSED IN SHABBY clothes, a Russian knocked on the door of the American embassy in one of the Baltic states in March 1992. He was turned away disappointed, not once but twice. The Americans seem to have been nervous that the elderly man claiming he used to work for the KGB may have been a test of their new, more friendly relationship with Moscow. So the next stop for the Russian was the British embassy in Riga, Latvia, where he explained to a female diplomat that he had worked in the KGB’s First Chief Directorate and had access to top secret material. The Russian pulled open his bag. Inside were spicy sausages, bread, and dirty clothes. But he also pulled out some handwritten notes. These, he explained, were the names of illegals operating in the West—both their real identities and their cover names. The British diplomat immediately called MI6. At the time, the British Secret Service was based at Century House in Lambeth, a grubby, twenty-story tower block. It was a gloomy place that reeked of the past. “Are you still here?” officials from the rest of government would sometimes joke with its chief, Colin McColl, when they saw him. The Cold War was over and people were asking what exactly spies were for. But the team that dealt with Russia, and which sat on the thirteenth floor with a panoramic view of the nearby Oval cricket ground, had no intention of stopping even though their old adversary was on the back foot. The Russian defector in Riga, they soon learned, was a prize of the highest order. Vasili Mitrokhin was a former KGB archivist who now wanted to inflict as much damage as he could on his former employers. He had secretly copied out and then buried large chunks of the KGB’s operational history in the garden of his dacha.

MI6 organized Mitrokhin’s exfiltration via boat on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, while a young officer dug up his files so they could be removed in six large trunks. Three thousand five hundred counterintelligence reports would be sent to thirty-six countries. The US file alone consisted of eight hundred pages. The CIA counterintelligence chief rued the fact he had to travel to London cap in hand for material that could have been his. The FBI, meanwhile, said it was “the most detailed and extensive pool” of intelligence about enemy spies they had ever received. It led directly to a number of illegals, one of them a KGB man living on the American East Coast under the name Jack Barsky. He was put under surveillance by the FBI, who overheard him confessing who he really was to his wife. Disillusioned, he had actually told the KGB back in 1988 that he had been dying of AIDS so that he could give up spying and bring up his child.

Fortunately for Heathfield and Foley in Canada, they had been deployed after Mitrokhin had retired in 1984. But the defection meant that Moscow could not be sure that the legend of any illegals trained before that date had not been blown. When the scale of the disaster became clear, the SVR knew it would have to rebuild its deep cover networks by sending out even more new illegals.

In Britain, there were only limited resources to follow up the two hundred leads Mitrokhin produced about possible agents. The domestic security service MI5 had cut back its counterespionage teams by more than half between 1990 and 1994. A joint MI5-MI6 team targeting Russians in the United Kingdom had been disbanded. In one case a team was passed an intercept suggesting a message was about to be picked up from a drop site, offering the chance to catch a Russian intelligence officer in the act. But at the last moment, the surveillance team was pulled off to deal with something considered a higher priority. The sense was that all of this spy-versus-spy stuff was a bit old-fashioned. There was an important contrast in the 1990s. Western leaders and policy makers thought the Cold War had been won and Russia barely mattered anymore. Russia would “naturally” end up a liberal democratic state. That meant spying on Russia and catching Russian spies was no longer a priority. There were other threats to worry about now. But meanwhile, Russia, on the back foot, felt it needed intelligence on its old adversaries more than ever, precisely because it was vulnerable.

IN MOSCOW, CIA and MI6 officers found themselves in a strange new world. A few months after the coup, John Scarlett became MI6’s first-ever head of station who was “declared” to the other side’s spies. It was a second Moscow posting for the future MI6 chief and as he walked the streets, he could sense how the speed of the Soviet Union’s collapse had been bewildering and traumatic. “People were out in the streets selling their personal belongings,” he later recalled. Russia had gone from being a superpower seeing itself as on a par with the United States to an economic basket case. Some liberals in Moscow had hoped for an infusion of support from the West. Instead all they got were businessmen out to make money and some economists from Harvard promoting “shock therapy” in the form of relaxing price controls and privatizing state industries to create “popular capitalism.” The result was a disaster. The economy went into in free fall, with prices skyrocketing, savings disappearing, manufacturing collapsing, and unemployment rising rapidly. This was a catastrophic first experience of Western capitalism in the early 1990s. For most people shock therapy simply created shock. The West saw outward signs of change in elections and privatization but it did not see the pain inflicted on ordinary people. But then it was not really that interested. The Cold War was over. It had won. And so who needed to worry about Russia?

As Western spies sat down with their old adversaries over vodka, they could sense the Russians struggling to come to terms with their new status. But in the meetings there was more drinking than trust. Each side thought the other had not stopped spying. And each was right. The SVR was certainly going through difficult times, but those who watched Russia closely in the CIA began to see warning signs that the old enemy was returning faster than anyone realized. In one officer’s mind, the KGB had splintered but then reconstituted itself to fight again, a bit like the robot in the Terminator films. But no one at the top was paying attention to the warnings of people dismissed as “Cold War dinosaurs.” “People looked at me like I was insane. It was lonely,” recalls one CIA officer. While most people in the West believed Russia was changing, the old guard in the spy business—who could still feel the watching eyes on the streets of Moscow—never believed it had or would.

In Moscow, the Russians were likewise convinced MI6 and the CIA had never stopped their work against them. Many former KGB officers were convinced that the fall of the Soviet Union had been the result of subversion carried out by Western intelligence rather than internal decay. Now, the territory under Moscow’s control had shrunk and its buffer from the West had gone. The Russians thought the strategy was continuing to try to keep Russia down when the truth was almost more painful—the West at the highest policy level had lost interest in Russia. There was no master plan. But in Moscow, the spies could also see their opposite numbers in the CIA and MI6 as busy as ever. John Scarlett’s time in Moscow would end with his expulsion over the recruitment of one agent (although the real reason was a row over who his Russian counterpart would be in London). The CIA and MI6 were opening up intelligence stations in its neighborhood—including former parts of the Soviet Union like the Baltic states—which were then being used to persuade Russians to walk over the border with secrets. Russians—including former KGB officers—were lining up to sell what they knew. There were so many, the CIA was literally turning them away. The knowledge of this pained old KGB hands deeply. It was a humiliation.

In 1994, Vyacheslav Trubnikov took over as head of the SVR. Russia, he told me years later in Moscow, wanted to be an equal partner, working together against common threats like terrorism and proliferation. But instead it took the message that “Russia as the defeated side should stick to the rules and manners, which will be dictated by the victorious allies.” NATO, rather than disbanding, instead expanded closer to Russia’s borders, breaking what Moscow believed was a promise. Too many Western spies were engaged in what Trubnikov (rather endearingly) describes as “hanky panky.” He points to one Western intelligence agency running a sting operation to smuggle nuclear material out of Russia in order to make the point that Moscow could not be trusted to look after it anymore. The belief the other side had not stopped meant you could not, either.

Inside the CIA, the tension over how to view Russia remained intense. One of his subordinates recalls Milt Bearden referring to Russia as “Ouagadougou with rockets,” another remembers it being “Upper Volta with rockets,” but the meaning was the same—a country that was significant only because it happened to have nuclear missiles. Bearden suggested the CIA’s Moscow station would eventually be no different from Paris, staff remember him saying. The agency would gather intelligence on political developments but work jointly with the Russians on issues like terrorism, drugs, and weapons proliferation. That idea sent shudders down the spine of the small band of old hands. Deep inside Russia House, the CIA’s old guard were not willing to let go. They still hungrily sought the tiniest scraps of intelligence. That was because they harbored a dark secret. The hunt for spies had not ended as the Cold War concluded. For all the talk of its adversary being on the back foot, there were a select few within the CIA who knew the Russians had moles burrowed somewhere among them.

4

“Karla”

IN JUNE 1988, the CIA’s Moscow station chief, Jack Downing, had been traveling on the “Red Arrow”—the Leningrad-Moscow overnight train. In the early hours of the morning, he stepped out of his compartment to strike up a cigarette. At that moment a young Russian walked up to him, shoved an envelope into his hand, and then quickly disappeared down the corridor. This was enticing but also dangerous. The CIA man stuffed the envelope into his coat and quickly returned to his own compartment. He knew there might be cameras, so he waited until he was in a secure room at the consulate in Leningrad before he opened the envelope. Inside was a surveillance picture of himself—the type the KGB took of its targets, along with documents and a note. In the note a Russian claimed he was a KGB officer who worked in the Second Chief Directorate and whose job was to watch American spies. His marriage was on the rocks and he wanted to escape but he was willing to provide intelligence to the CIA before they got him out. It seemed a godsend after dark times for the agency in Russia.

The previous years had been bleak ones. The agency had stared into the abyss back in 1985. The CIA’s Soviet and Eastern Europe division had patiently built up an impressive stable of agents over a number of years. And then they watched their assets go dark one by one in a matter of months. The morning cables brought near-daily news of disasters as KGB officers spying for America literally disappeared, often failing to show up to meet their CIA handlers at an agreed time and then missing the fallback contact. Many, they would later find out, had been executed, their families only informed that their bodies had been buried in unmarked graves.

Deep within Langley, behind a door with five cipher locks, a team had been set up to try to find out why. For some it was personal—agents whose intelligence they had handled were now dead. On a whiteboard they outlined what they knew. Perhaps it was some kind of compromise in the CIA’s Moscow station? Or their communications had been broken? That was more appealing than the alternative—a traitor. In early 1986, Russia House was faced with a dilemma when a new Soviet official volunteered to spy. They took him on and had one goal: keep him alive. They kept the circle of knowledge to as small a group as possible—only a handful of people who kept off regular communications channels and who would travel roundabout routes to meet the agent. This, one veteran says, was the moment of creation of what they describe as a CIA within the CIA—an inner core determined to protect their secrets and battle the KGB. These were people who were paranoid with good reason, a kind of secret society within a secret agency. They knew they faced a formidable adversary. A foe that was determined to divert them from the truth. And this opponent had a name and, for those who met him, a face.

The Russian on the train did not give his name but the CIA code-named him “PROLOGUE.” “He played the role brilliantly,” says one person involved in the case. He would also, perhaps because of the way he came and went over the years, become known as “phantom.” The intelligence he provided included a rundown of the activities of the CIA’s Moscow station and details of the 1985 losses. He provided information that suggested that those disasters had been the result of bad tradecraft, rather than a mole. Some were skeptical about this new source but the “front office” who ran operations wanted to believe he was the real deal. The divisions over whether to believe him became bitter. There would be a show of hands on whether to trust him at one point. The decision was to keep going. There were clues that something was wrong—a piece of intelligence suggesting he was happily married, for instance, which was at odds with the story he told. But over the next three years, he would lead the CIA in a merry dance, delivering documents and diverting and distracting. He knew what the CIA wanted and he knew how to offer it to them in a way they could not resist. In 1990, the time had finally come for him to be exfiltrated. He was given false documents but never showed up for a pickup that would have taken him to a ferry to get out through the Baltics into Finland. The game was up. A cable was sent from Moscow back to headquarters with the bad news. Milt Bearden was in a room with some of the critics of the operation when he read it. “Don’t you say a f-ing thing,” he told them. The CIA had been played.

PROLOGUE had been a “dangle”—sent by the KGB to mislead and misdirect. His job was to keep the CIA off the scent of what had gone wrong in 1985. The KGB normally did not dangle its own officers because they knew so much. The fear was they might use the opportunity to defect for real. The Americans knew this, which was one of the reasons they took a chance on the man on the train. But the KGB was willing to take risks to protect its top spies. And the dangle was no ordinary KGB officer. The name of the Russian who had put on such a bravura performance was Alexander “Sasha” Zhomov. Two decades later, he would be present in Vienna in 2010 and watch a spy exchange he helped negotiate.

Little has been said publicly about him but there are those inside the CIA’s “Russia House” and who work on Russia at the FBI who to this day call Zhomov their “Karla”—the Russian spy who was the archenemy of George Smiley in John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor novels. Other colleagues shy away from that reference. They dislike it precisely because they did not want to turn him into some elusive, mythic character. But that is what he would become. His name still elicits a pause and the drawing of breath from some veterans of the spy wars.

Zhomov was short, intellectually strong rather than physically so—one American who met him describes him as always well dressed, with smart Italian shoes. He had piercing gray eyes, thick eyebrows, and jet-black hair. Sometimes when they saw him over the years he would have an elegant mustache, other times not. He was no thug. “He is smart as shit,” says one American spy who came up against him. “He got inside our heads,” another says, recalling how Zhomov loved the games within games that make up espionage and the deceptions it entails. (American spies play their own games when it comes to Zhomov though, with a number trying to plant the notion he might be homosexual precisely because they know it will get him into trouble in Russia.) Those who met him often recall the silver crucifix he wore and how he would touch it occasionally, almost as if to ward off demons. In the late 1980s, he had already spent years studying the “main enemy” as a protégé of “the Professor,” Rem Krassilnikov, who ran the First Department of the KGB’s Second Chief Directorate. This was the department tasked with catching American spies. Zhomov supervised the surveillance teams that watched their every move. He was the man who would receive the daily reports of what the bugs in their houses had picked up or who had been out where or what they said on the phone. He knew their lives intimately. And in the PROLOGUE operation he got the chance to study his opponents face-to-face. This and other successes meant Zhomov would rise up in the KGB and then its domestic successor agency—the FSB—to eventually run the department hunting American spies and the Russians who spied for them.

One thing that marked out the Russians was their patience and persistence—not just in sending illegals abroad but also trying to catch foreign spies operating at home. CIA officers would come and go from Moscow Station; sometimes one would come back for a second posting after a decade away. But Zhomov was always there. He knew each individual, how they operated, and every trick and tactic they used. It meant he could immediately tell if there was some tiny change in behavior that suggested something was happening.

Zhomov’s deception operation in the dying days of the Cold War had been designed to put the Americans off the scent of the moles that the KGB had inside American intelligence. It was not lost on anybody that the KGB would not dangle one of its own officers for nothing. If PROLOGUE was a dangle, then it meant there was likely a mole he was trying to protect. The small team of American mole hunters slowly began to narrow down the possible list of traitors who had access to the compromised intelligence. The investigation waxed and waned as superiors lost interest, but the team continued its search. By 1993, the CIA team had narrowed down the list to one officer. But there was still skepticism in many quarters and the FBI would not go along with their assessment. And so it took a spy to help push the investigation over the line.

What can seem so arcane in the world of espionage between Russia and the West is that so much of what goes on is what is known as counterintelligence—the world of spy on spy. Counterintelligence is about understanding and battling your opposing intelligence service. It can seem inward looking. But it has consequences. If your enemy has a spy in your ranks, then everything you do can be compromised. Your agents’ lives are at risk and so are your secrets. Your opponent can feed in false information to deceive you. The trauma of having your intelligence service penetrated is intense. It means you have played the game and lost. It took MI6 decades to recover from the discovery that one of its most senior officers, Kim Philby, was working for the KGB (the inspiration for John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy). So how do you stop such a disaster? One way is to play defense and protect your secrets and watch your own people. But that is hard (and creates the kind of surveillance state the KGB operated at home). So the best defense is a good offense. If you recruit one of their spies you can find out who they have recruited on your side. If you feared your own intelligence service was penetrated, then the most effective way of finding the traitor is not through detective work but to recruit a spy in your opponent’s intelligence service who can tell you who is responsible. It takes a spy to catch a spy. This truth drives each side to try to penetrate the other. This is the inner core of the spy world—its inhabitants sometimes drawing suspicion from their colleagues since they are looking for traitors and deception everywhere around them. It takes a particular mind-set to be able to work in counterintelligence—but for some, too much time immersed in this world of the “wilderness of mirrors” could drive you mad as you lost the ability to distinguish between deceit and truth.

IN AMERICA’S MOLE hunt, the detective work to find their mole was supplemented by vital intelligence from a KGB officer. Alexander Zaporozhsky would be one of the four men swapped in Vienna in 2010 and was one of the most important agents of the era, even though little has emerged publicly about him. Zaporozhsky had joined the KGB in 1975 and served in Africa and in the Latin America department. He was tall and athletic. Former colleagues say he was an ambitious workaholic and a risk taker. In a posting to Ethiopia in the mid-1980s, he had become fluent in the local language of Amharic and was a skilled recruiter of agents, supposedly recruiting dozens of well-placed sources. But it was not the most prestigious posting and, unhappy over his career and money, he offered to spy for the CIA. He was code-named “Max.” The Americans found him well-spoken and self-assured. “If you were casting someone for the role of a KGB colonel, he would get the part,” says one person who knew him. But he had been hard to handle, sometimes feeding erratic information to his handlers and disappearing for long periods. Eventually he would become a colonel in the SVR’s North American department. In the years of turmoil and decline in the early 1990s his disillusion grew. These were difficult times with the country in crisis and spies were eager to cash in as discipline deteriorated. In 1993, Zaporozhsky, even though he did not know the traitor’s name, passed on a piece of information that helped identify the mole that the KGB and SVR had inside the US intelligence community. For this clue, Zaporozhsky would be well rewarded but also pay a price.

The clue confirmed that Russia House itself had a traitor. Aldrich Ames was a second-rate spy who was convinced he was first-rate. For all his failings, he had still been appointed to a sensitive role working on counterintelligence in the Soviet division. In 1985, he had used the pretext of trying to recruit a Soviet diplomat to instead offer the KGB his services. In his second meeting he provided a haul of information the KGB would describe as stunning, tilting the balance of the spy wars in Moscow’s direction. “He was as lazy, sloppy, and careless at spying as he was at his CIA job,” writes former colleague Mike Sulick. When investigators closed in, they found operational notes torn up in his trash. On February 21, 1994, the FBI arrested him. The revelation that the CIA had harbored a mole working on its crown-jewel operations was a hammer blow. “His treachery devastated the CIA,” Sulick later wrote. A generation of Russian agents had been sold out and now it looked like the agency could not be trusted to keep secrets. Ames’s treachery also played into a debate in Washington that asked what the CIA was really for now that the Cold War was over. Congress and the press went on the attack. Worse, a few on the inside soon realized Ames could not have been responsible for all of the compromises. That meant there was another traitor still out there—this was the man who had made the drop in the park as the Russian coup was beginning on the Monday morning in August 1991.

A CIA delegation headed to Yasenevo to deal with the fallout of Ames. There were no pleasantries as both sides tried to work out how to deal with the other in this new world of liaison meetings but when both also knew the old spy games continued. “These things happen,” the head of the SVR said, as if to brush events off. “It’s the nature of the business.” The CIA man explained there would have to be consequences—there was too much anger in Washington. “Things will get ugly. That’s inevitable. The question is how can we contain the damage?” Each side expelled spies from the other’s embassy. It was agreed they should try to maintain contact, though. Soon after the Americans were introduced to the man who would be their new liaison officer. The door swung open. In walked Sasha Zhomov.

THE CAPTURE OF Ames, in turn, started a spy hunt in Moscow. The FSB was determined to find out why their star agent had been discovered. Battered by defections among their ranks as their country went through a crisis in the 1990s, Russia’s spy hunters felt a burning anger. They had held the upper hand but had now been betrayed—including by their own colleagues. And they wanted revenge. Zhomov would be the man to deliver it. It would become his driving mission for the years to come. He never believed the false trail the CIA had put out that Ames had been caught purely thanks to detective work. He knew that spies catch spies. When one of your agents is caught, it means you have been penetrated. And to find that spy, the best method is, of course, to recruit a spy in your opponent’s camp. And so the wheel turned again and the cycle of espionage began over. The ghosts of the Cold War would continue to haunt the corridors of the Lubyanka and Langley even as that conflict faded, the mole hunters on each side determined to exorcise the demons of the past. But in doing so they would raise new ones for the future.

5

Undercover

“IT IS LIKE walking a tightrope,” Donald Heathfield said of his double life as an illegal. “When you first step on it, you are scared. It is very high, you don’t know what to do. But if you keep doing it in the circus for ten years, you can do it with your eyes closed.” It took a full decade to learn the ropes, a decade of patiently building your cover, the thrill of clandestine work mixed with the mundane reality of everyday life. It was not glamorous. When Heathfield set up his own business in Canada, it was not the “Universal Export” of a James Bond front company. Instead, the deep-cover Russian spy drove a van full of baby diapers door-to-door. “Diapers Direct” sold a box of two hundred for twenty dollars for those who valued the price and convenience of a bulk order delivered direct to your house. Heathfield had a good feel for the capitalist West and the business generated publicity with a feature in the Toronto Star newspaper. At the same time, he was also taking a bachelor’s degree in international economics from York University. His wife, Elena, now Ann Foley, joined a Catholic church, its customs and rites having been taught in spy school. One thing they needed was people who could vouch for them as friends and perhaps sign the right documents. Foley went to a church where the priest was an elderly, warmhearted man. Foley first joined the choir and used that to get herself close to another young woman at the church who in turn introduced her to the priest. Every relationship served a purpose. Their family was also growing. On June 3, 1994, a second son, Alex, was born in Toronto.

For Directorate S, children posed a dilemma. In the Cold War, if one half of a couple remained in Russia there were special boarding schools for the children of illegals. In one case an illegal spent seventeen years abroad. His wife remained in Russia and his son would be brought to meet him in a Western European country the illegal could visit. This was “so that the boy saw what a worthy father he had,” Yuri Drozdov, a head of Directorate S, later said. “But a tragedy happened. The son, on vacation at camp, drowned, and the father came to the funeral for a day. One day.” That was all the time that was possible while retaining his cover before he had to return to the West.

Heathfield and Foley hid their old selves from those around them—including their children. They spoke little of their early life. Every family has its own quirks, and no one has grown up in another to know what is entirely normal and what is odd. At one point the children said they remember meeting people they thought were grandparents on vacation somewhere in Europe. When asked if they were speaking Russian, Alex replied, “I was really young, I have no idea.” Timothy says he remembered seeing them every few years until he was eleven. “If I had seen them when I was older, I would have realized that they don’t speak English—they don’t seem very Canadian.” The children would get Christmas presents from these grandparents. They were told they lived in Alberta, Canada. Photos showed them with snow in the background. It was really Siberia.

The life of an illegal involves sacrifice. Contacts with family back home were limited. The couple’s parents only learned of the arrival of their grandchildren weeks after the births. The parents had to send letters to a mailbox in Moscow, where they could be encoded. Sometimes when Heathfield and Foley were abroad and could meet KGB and then SVR officers in person, they would get an original handwritten letter. Once it was read, it had to be destroyed. Every three years or so they might be able to meet their family on a trip but there could be no promises about when it might happen again. Bezrukov’s father would die while he was undercover. He only learned about it weeks later. There was no way he could go to the funeral. “You must have a strong a core,” his wife would say. She missed the chance to pay last respects to her sister before she died. “It is a heavy burden for an average person. You have to be very strong and very certain you are doing the right thing.”

The parents were also prepared for questions from curious Americans. In the Soviet Union, citizens were given vaccine injections in a different place than Americans and it left a scar. Elena—now Ann—would try to keep the scar covered. She would have to explain she had grown up in an African or Asian country where it was done like that. In the Soviet Union, dentists also used a kind of cement filling for teeth that would never be used in America or Europe. The same excuse—early years spent in the developing world—would cover for that. Every detail mattered. When their predecessor, Konon Molody, had been caught in the United Kingdom, one thing that gave him away was the fact that he had not been circumcised. A doctor recalled that the real Gordon Lonsdale, born in Canada, had been.

For illegals, a double life meant long hours. There were full-time jobs to hold down plus the normal struggles of family life. And then there was the second career as a spy, seeking out contacts and composing messages to Moscow Center. Every time an operational act had to be carried out—a letter marked with invisible ink that had to be posted, a signal site checked—an illegal would have to spend at least two or three hours on foot and on public transport carrying out a surveillance detection route to make sure they were not being tailed. The couple was disciplined about never speaking Russian in the house. “Heathfield does not know Russian,” Bezrukov would later say of his old self. “If you wake him up in the middle of the night, he doesn’t speak it.” Nor would they discuss anything operational—just in case there was a bug. The same went for talking in their car. If they did need to talk, they would go for a walk in the park, often taking the kids with them; later they would go jogging together. Their old selves were buried deep. To adapt to the life in a foreign country, you have to give up everything you had from your childhood, “forget it, get rid of it,” Foley later said. “Otherwise, you will suffer from nostalgia. Any mention of Russia, Russian music, Russian speech in the street, throws you off the balance and provokes memories.” They created false memories drawing on real people or events and transferring them onto new people and Canada. At some level, they began to believe these were true and that they had indeed lived a different life. But there was always the knowledge in the back of your mind that one day something might happen that would knock you off your tightrope and send you tumbling down.

In August 1995, the family sold off the business and house and moved to Paris, where Heathfield studied for a master’s degree in international business, living in a small flat near the Eiffel Tower. The same year that they left Canada, Alexander Poteyev, now an SVR officer on the rise, moved to New York. For now, he was a loyal member of the Russian intelligence service despite all the problems his country was enduring.

From afar, Heathfield and Foley could read the news about the turbulence back home in Russia in the 1990s. In their absence, their homeland was changing rapidly. These were difficult years as the country struggled to come to terms with its new status and economic crisis. Everyone was on the make, including the spies. Organized crime began to emerge, settling its scores with violence. A few sharp-eyed Russians bought up shares in privatized industries and accumulated huge wealth. They would become known as oligarchs. In the wild-west capitalism of the 1990s, wealth and power were tightly bound and a gun to the head settled disputes.

In the early evening of June 7, 1994, a remote-controlled bomb detonated as Boris Berezovsky’s Mercedes drove away from his office. The driver was killed but the target survived. A mathematician by training, Berezovsky had started a car dealership but then moved into everything from oil to TV to airlines. A brooding and pugnacious character, he would become the first among equals of the oligarchs and a power in the land, always ready to scheme and plot. A sandy-haired, serious-minded, thirty-one-year-old FSB officer named Alexander Litvinenko was assigned to investigate the assassination attempt. Litvinenko had been recruited into the domestic arm of the KGB in the late 1980s. In 1991, he had been sent to Moscow to work on organized crime. That gave him an education in how the security services had intertwined themselves in the new chaotic, corrupt, freewheeling economy. As well as investigating the Berezovsky assassination attempt, Litvinenko was also ordered to report back on the oligarch to the FSB. Later that year, a brutal conflict broke out in Chechnya and Litvinenko was sent to work on counterterrorism. His and Berezovsky’s paths would cross again a few years later. At one point the chaos was so bad that Boris Yeltsin looked as if he might lose the 1996 election—to, of all things, a communist. Yeltsin arranged a secret deal with the oligarchs. They would throw their money and influence behind his campaign in return for stakes in the vast state-owned natural resource industries and also more influence. Berezovsky organized the deal and became deputy head of the national security council in the wake of the election. As the decade came to an end, his power was reaching its zenith. But it would not last much longer.

ON AUGUST 20, 1999, more than a decade after first surfacing in Canada, Donald Heathfield and Ann Foley finally arrived in their “target” country. Heathfield and Foley had come to America—and would become naturalized American citizens—for a reason. Human intelligence is about people—people who have access to secrets, to power, and to influence. The job of the illegals was to find those people. “Our goal was not to steal a blueprint—as they show it in the films,” explained Elena Vavilova. “Our goal is to find that ‘somebody.’ ” That could be a diplomat or an engineer, a politician or an academic. The illegals’ mission was to subvert America from within, infiltrating deep into its society and in doing so identifying and helping recruit people who could aid Moscow.

Heathfield had landed at one of the best places for his particular line of business. Like any student, when he applied to Harvard, he knew it was a ticket to the big time, a chance to make contacts and open doors, to work his way into the elite circles of American life. The difference from most other students was that this would be for Moscow’s purposes and not just his own self-advancement. He was studying for a master’s in public administration at the Kennedy School of Government. The school was often looked down on by the traditional academic departments, but everyone knew the reason to attend was the connections it offered. The faculty was packed full of former officials and politicians. Former and current CIA officers, senators, and policy wonks all made it their home. And the students who came were ambitious and would make their way into government in the United States or around the world, especially in the midcareer program that Heathfield joined.

Heathfield arrived in late 1999 and gained a reputation as a sociable member of his class of two hundred students. He said he was from Montreal. If pressed about his accent, he would say he was the son of a diplomat and had been to school in the Czech Republic. Heathfield organized a drinking night in which fifty members of the class visited Canadian students to try high-end Scotch. “We called it the Royal Canadian Scotch Stagger,” one later remembered. The night ended at 3 a.m. at Heathfield’s house. The networking opportunities were ample. Among those in his year was Felipe Calderon, who would later become president of Mexico, as well as others who would run for political office in the United States and work with the US Army. Heathfield, fellow students remember, was particularly good at keeping track at what people got up to afterward. Harvard would provide the credentials for his future career but was also the first stage in trying to find that “somebody” who could—wittingly or unwittingly—serve Moscow. “The main task of an agent is constantly climb the social ladder, achieving contacts with more and more prominent society members. Because it is only there that you find really valuable information,” he later said.

On a sunny day in May 2000, Donald Heathfield attended his graduation ceremony. He was all smiles. It was a proud day for all the family. Ann was at his side, looking smart with a pale blue jacket and a pair of sunglasses. At her side were young Alex and Timothy. The mission seemed to be progressing well. But what the family did not know was that they were being watched. Spotting an illegal in the wild is incredibly challenging—that is the point. They could be anyone—your neighbor, your coworker (even, in one case, your dentist)—they are almost impossible to find. Unless, of course, you have your own spy in their ranks.

Heathfield and Foley were ghosts—their identities stolen from the dead. But they were not invisible. Close to them at the graduation ceremony—just a few feet away—were people silently hovering around them. These figures furtively snapped pictures of the couple with their children. They were members of the FBI’s Special Surveillance Group—the SSG, often called the Gs. Decades earlier the FBI’s surveillance had been something of a joke—the regulation dark suits and white shirts were a giveaway. So they had learned from their British cousins at MI5 how to set up specialist teams who could blend in anywhere and looked like ordinary people—a mirror to what the illegals themselves were trying to do. And because their job was to be unseen as they tailed their targets, the Gs were also known as “Ghosts.” That sunny day at Harvard, ghosts were chasing ghosts.

6

The Source

IN THE LATE 1990s, as Donald Heathfield was arriving at Harvard, Alexander Poteyev was making his way every morning to the Russian mission to the United Nations. The mission is a slice of Moscow dropped slap-bang in the middle of Manhattan, a dull-gray Soviet-style twelve-story building at 136 East 67th Street. On the same block sits the 19th precinct station of the New York City Police Department and the 16th Ladder of the Fire Department. Directly across the road is a synagogue. In an act of defiance during the Cold War, the synagogue had a large plaque placed outside for Russian diplomats. “Hear the Cry of the Oppressed. The Jewish Community of the Soviet Union,” it reads. No doubt, the FBI also has a presence somewhere to watch those leaving and entering the Russian building. And in the late 1990s, Poteyev was of particular interest. He is an elusive figure whose life is deliberately shrouded in mystery. But while FBI and CIA officials adamantly refuse to confirm or comment on the identity of the origins of the investigation into Russian illegals and many of the details come from Russian sources, there is no doubt that Alexander Poteyev was the key figure. He was the reason why Donald Heathfield was followed at his graduation. It took a spy to catch the spies. Poteyev was “the source.”

POTEYEV WAS BORN on March 7, 1952, in the Brest region of Belarus, in what was then the Soviet Union. His father, Nikolai Poteyev, had commanded T-34 tanks with distinction in World War II, earning the title “Hero of the Soviet Union” for his role in battle in the Baltic front in September 1944, but died when Alexander was twenty. His son followed him into the army and in 1975 he joined the KGB, first serving in Minsk and then from 1978 in Moscow, though not yet as a spy. During these years he met and married Marina and they would have a daughter and then a son.

In 1979, Poteyev went on the Advanced Course for Officers (KUOS). The name was misleading. It was better known as “the school for saboteurs.” This was the KGB’s elite paramilitary training for those destined for either irregular combat or stay-behind and sabotage roles in the event of World War III and other conflicts. It came under the wing of Directorate S’s Department 8, which carried out “special operations.” These were unique roles that combined the ability to work undercover for long periods as a spy with high-end military training. Poteyev would soon get his chance to put those skills into action.

On Christmas Eve 1979, Soviet troops were ordered into Afghanistan to quell a growing insurgency and topple a leader insufficiently pliant to Moscow’s orders. Directorate S’s Department 8 had already tried to assassinate the Afghan leader by sending an illegal documented as an Afghan to get a job as a cook and poison his fruit juice. But the Afghan leader was suspicious enough to carefully mix his drinks. So Moscow resorted to an all-out assault on the presidential palace led by Directorate S and GRU special forces (the “illegal” cook had to hide to avoid being shot by his compatriots during the raid). Poteyev was sent early to Afghanistan as one of the Directorate S “Zenit” teams. The invasion set the scene for a brutal struggle as a bloody insurgency by mujahideen fighters gathered strength. This was fueled by weapons and money sent by Islamic states and the CIA (led, in part, by Milton Bearden), who saw it as a chance to give their Soviet enemy a bloody nose. It was a savage and dirty fight—the Soviet Union’s version of Vietnam—from which many young men returned in body bags. Poteyev was on the front lines. One of the only photos of him is as part of Zenit—a young-looking figure in fatigues with a blank expression. One KGB colleague from those days simply remembers Poteyev as someone who liked to drink and who had a good sense of humor.

Poteyev next served in “Cascade,” a new task force formed to fight guerrilla warfare. Like a US special forces team in Afghanistan in later years, their job was to seek intelligence and use it to hunt for the enemy and its agents in the towns and countryside. This included using illegals who could pose as fake mujahideen to lure others into ambushes. Out of Cascade, Yuri Drozdov, the head of Directorate S, would form a new special forces unit for covert action behind enemy lines called Vympel. The intervention in Afghanistan proved disastrous for the Soviet Union, but for Poteyev, it was a stepping-stone. He was awarded the Red Star and other decorations before being selected to attend the Red Banner Institute to be trained as an intelligence officer (at the same time as Bezrukov and Vavilova were being trained as illegals). Poteyev must have been effective as a spy, because in 1995 he was sent on a plum posting to New York. He arrived as a second secretary at the Russian mission to the UN and stayed through 1999. The Russian ambassador to the UN at the time was Sergey Lavrov—later Russia’s long-serving foreign minister.

When he arrived every morning at the mission on 67th Street, Poteyev would take an elevator up to the eighth floor. In the lobby were two steel doors. There were no signs, but one was for the rezidentura—the intelligence station—of the GRU, military intelligence. The other door led to the SVR’s rezidentura, where Poteyev worked. Officers would pull out a small piece of metal and touch the head of a screw in the lower right corner of a brass plate by the door. That would complete an electric circuit—sometimes giving the person a tiny jolt—and the bolt would slide open. Behind the door was a cloakroom. Under the watchful eye of a camera, everyone would have to leave their coats as well as any electronic items in a locker to make sure nothing could be smuggled in or out. Next came another solid steel door with a numeric lock that required a code. Beyond it, the GRU and SVR offices were known as “submarines” since they were tightly enclosed to prevent FBI surveillance. Special teams had been flown from Moscow to create the structure, which sat on top of springs, creating a space from the main building structure to prevent cameras and listening devices being inserted. The walls were several inches thick and coated with wires that vibrated to emit a white noise. There were dedicated electrical and ventilation systems. On the SVR side there was a corridor ninety feet long with offices on either side. These were given over to the different “Lines” with different roles—one carried out technical interception; another, Line X, looked for technological secrets; VKR studied American intelligence; PR sought political contacts and information. Poteyev would walk into an office in the far corner of the floor.

Poteyev was a Line N officer. These are the spies under diplomatic cover whose job is to support the work of Directorate S illegals. Sometimes this can mean doing the legwork to establish a false identity—they were the ones traipsing around graveyards and church registries looking for names of dead children. They would also be in charge of getting hold of documents or visa applications so that Moscow Center can produce convincing forgeries. It could also mean supporting illegals directly. The whole point of illegals is that they do not appear Russian, so direct contact with anyone from the embassy is kept to an absolute minimum. But there might be moments when some kind of indirect contact is required—it could be an emergency signal left somewhere if something is going wrong—that might require a Line N officer checking every week to make sure there is not a chalk mark at a particular place. Or there might be documents or cash to leave in a dead drop for an illegal to pick up. Line N officers might also pass off new documents to an illegal transiting through their country or they might meet an illegal in a third country (often Mexico or somewhere in Latin America for US-based illegals).

There were 60 SVR officers based in New York in the late 1990s. They were running about 150 sources. As well as the mission, there was the Russian Consulate at East 91st Street, close to Central Park. Poteyev would likely have lived in a large, dingy tower on West 255th Street, in Riverdale in the Bronx, that was the residential compound. The rooms were small and smelly, with plenty of cockroaches. There was a small bar with cheap liquor and cigarettes, even a sauna, a swimming pool, and a school so that the Russians were not too tempted by the bright lights and enticements of the city on their doorstep. Surrounded by a chain security fence, the compound had been built on a steep hill. This allowed antennas to be placed that could intercept communications, and on the nineteenth floor, Line VKR—foreign counterintelligence—ran a system called “Post Impulse,” which tracked FBI signals. If they saw several FBI signals in the vicinity of one of their SVR officers they knew they might be under surveillance. In New York, the top mission for the SVR spies was penetrating the US mission to the UN; next was the missions of other permanent members of the Security Council—the United Kingdom, France, and China, followed by Germany and Japan and other NATO countries. Next were New York financial institutions, then the universities like New York University and Columbia, and finally Russian immigrant groups and foreign journalists.

From the day he arrived at the Russian mission to the UN, Poteyev had been closely observed by the FBI. They did this to all Russian officials using observation posts, surveillance teams, and bugs. But the FBI and CIA had a particularly good insight into what was going on at the Russian mission to the UN while Poteyev was there. That was because they already had a spy on the inside. Sergei Tretyakov was technically a first secretary but actually the deputy SVR resident since his arrival in 1995. A rotund, outgoing character, Tretyakov was one of those who looked at the SVR in the mid-1990s and saw only decay. When he visited Yasenevo, he remembered how it had grown grimy in his absence. The bathrooms, once spotless, now looked more like you would expect in a railway station. People looked unkempt and were drinking and leaving the office early. Jobs had been cut and many had gone off to make money. Disillusioned, he began working for the Americans and would spend the late 1990s providing highly valuable intelligence, including the names of undercover SVR officers across the United States and their agents.

The two Russians would have known each other, but Tretyakov did not introduce Poteyev to the Americans. Keeping agents separate was a vital principle of tradecraft or else the risk would be that one of them—if discovered or turned—could compromise the other. Tretyakov would, though, have been able to tell the Americans all about the officers in the mission, including Poteyev, which may have aided their understanding of him and whether he could be approached. In October 2000, rather than return to Russia, Tretyakov simply disappeared. SVR operations in North America were dealt a huge blow. But the SVR did not know things were even worse than they feared. There was another spy.

Poteyev was watched for some time by the FBI. FBI teams study every Russian diplomat, building up a file on them. What is their work pattern? Does their routine make them look like a real diplomat or might they be a spy? What kinds of things do they do in their spare time? As well as hoping to catch them in the act of espionage (always difficult), the counterspies are looking for “the hook”—the aspect of their life you can cast your line toward and hope it catches so you can reel them in. Sometimes they will be overheard on the phone talking in a way that sounds like high-minded ideological disillusionment but other times it is because they are observed gazing longingly at large plasma screen TVs in shop windows as they walk downtown.

What motivates such people to turn against their country and spy? Occasionally in the Cold War there were genuine ideological turncoats. But money and general disillusionment were more of an issue for Russian spies in the 1990s. They had watched the ideology they had signed up for disappear and their savings evaporate. Some literally became chicken farmers. Meanwhile, they could see others back home cash in in the new world of crony capitalism. Why—after all their service—should they not have some little nest egg to prevent their family from struggling? That was one reason. But the truth is that simple answers rarely suffice. Each case is unique. If you speak to those who target Russians, they say the simple notions of motivation rarely apply. The reality is much harder to unpick. It is sometimes tempting to reduce it all to something like money or grievance or ego. But, one old hand explains, the Russians are complicated. They are all maneuvering in their bureaucracy against each other, sometimes sleeping with each other or their partners, collecting compromising information on each other, and holding grudges for some slight inflicted on them years ago—any of which could lead one of them to suddenly decide to turn. Another former spy has a different take. In post-Soviet Russia it was not the people you expected to turn who did. Rather than unhappy, low-level intelligence officers, it was more senior ones who changed sides. They had got far up the tree but then realized they were not going to go any further since when you reached a certain level, politics and corruption took over and it did not matter how good you were. That was the moment you might be willing to turn.

What was the case with Poteyev? Russian spies would later bitterly attribute Poteyev’s actions to the “unraveling” of the 1990s, when everything was for sale and when security was so lax and no one cared where you got your money or stashed it away. The 1990s were difficult times for Russia’s spies—the old certainties of communism gone, a new, almost alien world back in Russia in which a wild form of capitalism and gangsterism seemed to be flourishing. For old SVR hands, a demoralized service without an ideological compass was vulnerable to its opponents, allowing MI6 and the CIA to have a field day. His former colleagues would claim Poteyev sold them out “banally” for greed, saying the Americans exploited his love of money and alcohol. They would say that he had got fond of life in the United States and its luxuries. There would be talk of shady deals in which Poteyev was involved in money laundering and helping other SVR officers buy homes and move their cash to America. All of this was used by the CIA, the Russians would later say. Much of this was wrong, misinformation, or reflected the bitterness of betrayed colleagues. Here, for the first time, are the outlines of the story.

The recruitment of Poteyev took place in 1999, at the end of his posting. It was not by the CIA but by the FBI’s New York field office. Recruiting Russian intelligence officers inside the United States is the province of the FBI rather than the CIA. In general, the FBI’s job is to catch people breaking the law and the CIA’s job is to break the laws of other countries by stealing their secrets. One side is cops, the other robbers. They have different cultures and relations can be rocky. There was real tension in the late 1990s between the CIA and FBI over counterterrorism, but the relationship in New York on counterintelligence was tighter. New York—with the world of business as well as the UN—was a fertile hunting ground for the bureau’s officers seeking to recruit Russian assets and the FBI’s New York office was big enough to have a critical mass of counterintelligence expertise. “The New York field office is its own world—with its own worldview,” one former FBI counterintelligence officer explains. “Most New York agents believe the sun rises and sets in the New York office,” says another. With so many potential targets in the city, the office had experience and swagger.

The field office is housed at Federal Plaza, a few blocks from the site of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. The counterintelligence team in the late 1990s was housed on the twenty-sixth floor, part of the National Security division, which was headed by the larger-than-life John O’Neill. In 2000, he mislaid a briefcase for a few hours that contained details of counterterrorist and counterespionage cases (perhaps including that of Poteyev). The briefcase incident provided one more excuse for those who did not like his hard-charging style, and he left soon after for a job at the World Trade Center, where he died on September 11, 2001.

The FBI would have seen that Poteyev liked life in America. But that was not a reason to assume he’d be open to spying for the United States. He was pitched by the FBI to see if there was a chance he might turn. This was commonplace. And it had happened with him not just once but again and again. He had declined. But as his posting was coming to an end and he was about to return to Russia, something changed. He decided he was ready. Why? It seems to have been a mix. There was certainly money. Like others in Russia in the 1990s, his pension had been cut drastically. There was also some disillusionment at the way the SVR had acted back home, including on a personal level, failing to support him through some difficult family times, including the death of a relative. But there was also disgruntlement. He wanted to extend his tour in the United States, but his request had been denied by Moscow Center. Poteyev was not quite what is called a “walk-in”—someone who walks in off the street and offers him or herself out of the blue. Rather, it was as his time in New York came to an end that he changed his mind and indicated he was interested. The Russians believe he was recruited in June 1999. US officials will not comment.

It was precisely what had annoyed him—having to go back home—that offered a rich opportunity for the FBI. Tretyakov had defected and stayed in the United States, but the real prize was being able to run an agent-in-place in Moscow who could continue to work his way up the system and deliver secrets. That is what the FBI wanted and the risk Poteyev was willing to take.

To succeed, an intelligence organization makes sure the recruitment and running of an agent is on a need-to-know basis within its own corridors. There is a reason for that. And the Poteyev case was a prime example. Just as the FBI had, in the form of Poteyev, recruited a source inside the SVR, the SVR was at that time still running its own agent inside the FBI who had not been identified. Robert Hanssen was the man who had been dropping off secrets in the park on August 19, 1991, as the Moscow coup took place. A misfit who shared details of his sexual fantasies about his wife online, he began to spy way back in 1979. He had actually stopped in the wake of the coup and the end of the Soviet Union, but in 1999, he resumed contact with the SVR and began to provide more vital intelligence. If word had got around the bureau about the new recruitment, Poteyev may not have lasted long. The counterintelligence spy games of the Cold War had still not yet finished playing out.

As he landed back in Moscow, Poteyev would have known his new secret could destroy his life if it was discovered. He was heading for a double life and walking his own tightrope, one that he knew could end at any moment if he made a slip or—more likely—if someone else betrayed his secret to the SVR. But on his return, he received a dream posting—for him and his new American friends. He was to join the senior ranks of Directorate S. He would eventually become the deputy head of Department 4—the team responsible for running illegals in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. This was one of the most secretive, compartmentalized parts of the entire SVR. Only a tiny group of people was allowed to know the identities of illegals sent abroad, in order to protect them. Only three officers had access to the personal files of illegals operating in the United States. Poteyev was going to be one of them and he was in charge of their day-to-day operational management. This was a stunning success for his handlers—if they could keep him from getting caught.

RUSSIA’S SPIES WERE on the back foot. And at the same time that the United States was scoring a success with one veteran of the Afghan war, MI6 had managed something similar with another. And the fate of the two spies would ultimately be drawn together.

IN MADRID IN the summer of 1996, a rugged first secretary at the Russian Embassy was walking in a park with a businessman from Gibraltar. The first secretary was an officer of the GRU—military intelligence. His name was Sergei Skripal. The businessman was an MI6 officer operating under “natural cover.” The Russian had been spotted by the Spanish as someone who might be interested in money. He was first introduced to a Spaniard. They talked about going into business together, exporting wine to Russia. The Spaniard next introduced Skripal to the businessman, who would offer something more lucrative but also more dangerous. The lure was the promise that together they might be able to go into the oil business in Russia. But as Skripal prepared to return to Moscow at the end of his posting, the MI6 officer showed his hand and revealed what he was really after.

This was typical of the kind of pitches to Russians in this period. It would involve approaching someone and offering them a contract for consultancy or discussions about business. No secrets would pass. But after a while, it would be explained that this work was sadly at an end but there was another possibility—perhaps further business dealings of a more sensitive nature. This would require the individual being put in touch with someone more closely associated with the British government. If you pitch right away saying, “Do you want to pass secrets for money?” the answer will be no. But one step at a time, reeling someone in can be a lot easier.

By the middle of the decade, MI6 had reduced by two-thirds the amount of effort it put into spying against Russia and the former Soviet Union. But a sharp young officer, Charles Farr, had taken over Russian operations in London and made the case that MI6 needed to take advantage of the moment and recruit sources for the long term. The officer who met with Skripal was a prodigious pitcher of Russians; “a magic recruiter” is how one of his colleagues remembers him. Skripal proved receptive. The reason was simple—he liked money and did not have much.

Skripal grew up in Kaliningrad, a strategic enclave on the Baltic coast sandwiched between Poland and Lithuania. It was a closed military zone but near enough to the West for the young Sergei to pick up the tinny sounds of BBC World Service radio, which carried news of a more colorful world. His father had been an artillery officer and Skripal joined the elite Soviet airborne troop. He, like Poteyev, had been sent to Afghanistan at the opening of the conflict to carry out undercover missions. These included targeting locals suspected of working with the CIA. Where Poteyev worked for the KGB, Skripal was selected to join Russian military intelligence—the GRU. The eyes and ears of the General Staff, it had always been a tough and uncompromising service, motivated more by patriotism and a military ethos than the ideological focus of the KGB, with which it competed.

The GRU took treachery seriously. There were claims that recruits were shown a film of one traitor being pushed into a furnace and burned alive. It was the one part of the Soviet Intelligence apparatus that did not change in name or culture as the Soviet Union became Russia. It included special forces and its own illegals whose job was to prepare for sabotage in the event of war. Caches of weapons were left ready (the West did something similar in Western European nations in case they were overrun). The GRU also had officers stationed under diplomatic cover in embassies, collecting information on military intentions and technology, including by recruiting agents. Skripal’s role, after graduating from the Diplomatic Military Academy, was in its First Directorate, which focused on Europe. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he had ended up in Madrid. And by the end of his time there he had acquired an MI6 code name: Forthwith.

How important was he as an agent? Opinions differ. In the late 1990s, the customers of MI6—the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence—were primarily interested in political developments in Russia and details of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. But what Skripal could offer was largely counterintelligence—details of the GRU and its operatives. This was of niche value, although for those interested in it, Skripal was an excellent source. His cooperation was erratic rather than regular. He was not classed as a full-fledged, recruited agent when he left Madrid and no one was sure his cooperation would continue when he returned to Moscow. But it would. And his new, senior role in the personnel department meant he was able to identify hundreds of GRU officers operating under diplomatic cover overseas, whose details MI6 could then pass on to other countries.

By the start of 2000, Skripal and Poteyev were both in Moscow, providing intelligence from inside their own spy agencies. The actual recruiting of a Russian spy on their home territory of Moscow itself is almost impossible. The slow cultivation of a relationship and the careful conversations required to sound someone out would almost certainly be spotted by the vast counterintelligence machinery. But if you have managed it overseas—like with Poteyev in New York or Skripal in Madrid—then it may be possible to run them back in Russia. But only one of this pair would escape capture. With Poteyev in Directorate S, US intelligence had scored a stunning coup. They had opened up a window right into the heart of the most secretive part of their adversary’s operations against them. As long as they had their source in place, they would be able to track illegals operating in the United States.

BUT THE RUSSIA that Poteyev had returned to after his time in New York was about to change. After the chaos of the 1990s, a new power was rising in the form of a former KGB officer who had traitors in his sights. The United States had its window into the illegals program. But how long would it last?

7

The Investigation

RIFLING THROUGH SOMEONE else’s safety deposit box is the province of two kinds of people—thieves and FBI agents. On January 23, 2001, the latter were at work in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the leafy home of Harvard University. They were covertly searching through the personal items of one of the university’s recent graduates. They were there because, thanks to their source in Moscow, they believed the owner was a Russian illegal. Inside they found a birth certificate. It was for a Donald Howard Graham Heathfield. They snapped a photo and quickly returned it. It would take another four years for another piece of the puzzle to fit alongside the birth certificate. “Suddenly but peacefully,” Howard William Heathfield died at his home in Burlington, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, June 23, aged seventy, a 2005 death notice in the Canadian press read. “Howie” left behind a wife, three children, two grandchildren, and two dogs, called MacGyver and Holly. There had also been a son, Donald. But Donald had predeceased Howard. Although the middle name was different, both the death announcement and the birth certificate listed the mother’s name as Shirley. Donald Heathfield was not who he said he was.

Investigating illegals—like being one—required patience and attention to detail. Inside the safety deposit box, there were also photographs of Heathfield’s wife, Ann Foley, when she was younger. Many people have their memory boxes—the keepsakes, photos, and letters to recollect an earlier life. But for an illegal to do so was dangerous since it was, almost literally, another life. It was a security lapse. Perhaps Foley needed something to cling to in order to remind her who she really was. Not Ann Foley the Canadian, but Elena Vavilova, the Russian from Tomsk. But she had made a mistake. Surviving as an illegal is all about details—tiny details. And Foley and Moscow Center had missed one. Stamped on the negatives was the name of the company that had produced the film. It was called TACMA—a Soviet film company. It was another piece of crucial evidence for the FBI as the investigation got under way.

It is a mistake to describe the illegals arrested in 2010 as a “spy ring” or network. That implies they were one group working together. The reality was that they were sent out in pairs or individually at different times—some deep in the Cold War, others toward its end, and some after it was over. They would have been aware there were other illegals in the country, but for reasons of security they would not know who they all were. The SVR would not want the discovery of one illegal to allow the FBI to find the others by following them. But for the FBI, this was not a case of finding one illegal and then following them to another. Thanks to Poteyev, their source in Moscow, they knew who was in the United States and who was coming.

The first act that the FBI monitored had come a year before the safety deposit box. On January 14, 2000, Vicky Pelaez made a trip from New York to her native Peru. There she met a Russian official in a public park. She was given a bag. Inside was money from the SVR. What she did not know was that two FBI agents were videotaping the whole show. Once that was done, she called her house in Yonkers, New York. The FBI were also listening in on the line. “All went well,” she told Juan Lazaro. Vicky Pelaez was neither Russian nor an illegal but she was married to someone who was both. And she has always maintained she did not know her husband was a KGB illegal whose career had begun deep in the Cold War.

PELAEZ WAS A dark-haired, charismatic Peruvian. She was not a trained spy and her marriage was not arranged by Moscow Center. And rather than keep a low profile, she had lived a life marked by drama, controversy, and an outspokenness that did little to hide her political views. Born in 1956, Pelaez had studied journalism and became one of the first female reporters in Peru, working first for newspapers and then TV. Stylish and brave, she broke down barriers and challenged the stuffy style of traditional news. She quickly built a reputation as a gritty journalist, unafraid to take risks, and knew how to insert herself into a story, slipping behind police cordons and getting herself into places she was not supposed to be. The country was beset by political violence, and in 1984, she had the kind of brush with danger that can make a reporter’s name. Pelaez and her cameraman were kidnapped outside their TV station’s office in Lima by the revolutionary group Tupac Amaru. They were blindfolded and driven away. The group demanded that Pelaez’s TV channel broadcast a propaganda video that was left in a garbage can in return for the pair’s release. A few hours after the channel broadcast the clip, in which armed and hooded rebels accused the government of torture, the two were freed. When she returned to the newsroom, she encountered distrust from some of her colleagues. Soon after, she left Peru and came to the United States in 1985 on a visa as a political refugee because she was worried about possible threats from rebels.

She left for America with a new husband. Her first marriage, when she was just seventeen, was to Waldo Marsical and they had a son named after him. But the marriage did not last. It was while on assignment as a newspaper journalist in the early 1980s that she met the man who went by the name of Juan Lazaro. He was a photographer, ten years older but he looked good for it. The two soon became close, as work mingled with her private life. “She was a very passionate woman,” a colleague in Peru later said. “To her, he was a hunk.” She was a fair bit shorter than him and he taught martial arts. At one point, he pulled her up on his shoulders while out in a story so she could get a look at what was happening at the presidential palace. “I first admired him for his knowledge and ideas of social justice, then I was attracted by his physical strength,” she later wrote. On December 3, 1983, they were married. But she had married a lie.

The real Juan Lazaro was a toddler who had died aged three of respiratory failure in 1947, his mother crying whenever she talked about him in the years after. The fake one was another Russian dead double. His real name was Mikhail A. Vasenkov. Little is known of his early life but he is thought to have been born in Moscow in 1942. He left home young, leaving a brother behind whom he would not see again. Nor would he be there when his parents died. He had been selected for the KGB’s Directorate S, deep in the Cold War. Once his training was complete, he was sent out on assignment. He had come to Peru, sporting a decent-size mustache, on March 13, 1976, on a Uruguayan passport in the name of Juan Lazaro Fuentes. Spain had been his stop-off point to build the legend. After three months there he had flown from Madrid to Lima, with a forged letter on the stationery of a Spanish tobacco company saying he was coming to the country to carry out a market survey. Two years later he used his passport and a fake birth certificate saying he had been born in Montevideo in Uruguay on September 6, 1943, to request Peruvian citizenship, which he received in 1979. He said he was Uruguayan, but a lot of people found the accent a little odd, more European than Latin American. He rarely spoke of his family.

Lazaro used his cover as a photographer to travel and carry out missions for the KGB. It gave him the ability to meet politicians and businessmen. These were people who might be recruited to become “agents of influence” for the Soviet Union—such an agent did not necessarily provide secrets but instead offered the ability to alter the course of events, small or large, to suit Moscow’s needs—perhaps a journalist spreading information or a businessman laundering money or a politician making decisions. Russian reports, whose accuracy is hard to judge, suggest his marriage to Pelaez was genuine (although possibly with KGB approval), and her move to the United States provided an opportunity for him to move his work there, a decision sanctioned by the KGB leadership. FBI officials, though, wonder if Lazaro’s target may always have been to go to the United States.

After they moved to the United States, the couple settled in New York and in a house on Clifton Avenue in Yonkers. Pelaez became a US citizen, Lazaro a legal resident. Pelaez resumed her career as a journalist, working first as a reporter and then a columnist for a New York–based Spanish-language newspaper. Her political views were left-wing. She saw herself as standing up to the powerful and speaking for the oppressed and was a critic of American foreign policy, especially in Latin America. In 1993, Juan Jr. was born. He would go on to be a talented pianist who earned a scholarship to a Manhattan arts school. He would play Chopin and Beethoven to audiences, his eyes closed as he seemed absorbed by the music. At a concert in Peru, his proud father was interviewed by an education consultant about how he raised a musical prodigy.

Lazaro was a teaching assistant at the New School in Manhattan from 1993 (eventually earning a doctorate). Later he would be hired as an adjunct professor at Baruch College to teach a class on Latin America and the Caribbean. Like his wife, he seems to have done surprisingly little to hide his politics. Students remember his strident denunciations of US foreign policy. He praised Hugo Chávez, the populist left-wing leader of Venezuela, and attacked the invasion of Iraq as driven by corporate profit seeking.

What did Pelaez know of her husband’s identity and spy work? She always maintained she was not a spy and did not know her husband was a Russian illegal. The evidence produced by the FBI, though, suggests she was involved in clandestine behavior. From at least 2000, the FBI was on to the pair. A bugged conversation in the house on February 20, 2002, suggested Pelaez had just returned from Latin America and the couple talked about money she had brought back. A year later, they discussed whether they would have $72,500 or $76,000 after accounting for their expenses following another trip. The bug picked up a conversation on April 17, 2002, in which Lazaro described his childhood to Pelaez. At one point he said, “We moved to Siberia … as soon as the war started.” If he had been born in Uruguay, why was he brought up in Siberia? It is possible she thought his Latin American communist parents had lived in Russia. Or perhaps, as some FBI officials think, she knew more than she was letting on.

The trips to South America had another purpose as well as collecting money. They were a way of passing covert messages to Russian officials. And they were using one of the most old-fashioned pieces of spy tradecraft. In January 2003, shortly before a trip Pelaez was taking, the bugs in their house captured a conversation between her and Lazaro. He explained he was going to write in “invisible” and she was going to “pass them all of that in a book.”

Invisible ink goes back hundreds of years but was still being used by Lazaro to send some of his intelligence reports. The FBI would find pads of papers embedded with specially treated chemicals in their house. An illegal would write a normal-sounding letter to a fictitious friend. Then they would take a sheet of contact paper—almost like carbon paper—and place it over the letter and use a pencil to add a message onto the letter that could not be seen. They would have to carefully destroy the extra papers and mail the letter off to a foreign address—perhaps in Colombia or Austria—or deliver it by hand (as Pelaez seems to have been doing). A Line N officer would receive it and send it to Moscow, where the paper was developed and message decrypted. The whole process was time consuming and slow. But in the digital age, it can be particularly useful since it leaves no electronic trail for investigators to follow.

Communications back to home base are the most difficult and risky part of any spy’s work. The whole point of anyone operating undercover is that there should be as little as possible to tie them to their real controllers. If any evidence of contact is discovered, it is highly incriminating. But at the same time, instructions need to flow one way and intelligence back the other. Throughout history there have been many ways spies have sought to manage this process and minimize the risk, from face-to-face meetings to carrier pigeons. In order to preserve their secrecy, illegals were supposed to communicate directly with Moscow Center rather than through officers operating out of the SVR residency in their embassy.

Lazaro was the oldest of the illegals active in the United States. He had been trained in an era long before the internet or digital communications and so used the most old-fashioned techniques—like invisible ink and mailing letters. One counterintelligence official likens illegals to satellites launched out into space. They are sent out with what is state-of-the-art technology at the time, but they then have to keep using that for decades while they operate. Bringing them back home for training on an entirely new system is not something that can easily be done since it would take so long as to potentially jeopardize their cover. In this way, Juan Lazaro’s communications techniques were the most dated of the group, since he had been launched back in the Cold War, pre-digital, pre-internet era. “He was old school,” says one FBI officer.

The bug in Pelaez and Lazaro’s house also picked up an odd irregular clicking sound on a number of occasions. This, the FBI realized, was linked to the receipt of coded radio messages coming in from Moscow Center. On November 23, 2002, a bug captured Lazaro reading out loud as he composed a lengthy radiogram to Moscow Center about the conflict in Chechnya. Radiograms are coded bursts of data that can be picked up by a commercial radio receiver. This is a classic decades-old communications technique for illegals—still used to this day and which leaves no digital trail.

Twice a week illegals tuned in and then used a one-time pad of seemingly random numbers that were then added to or subtracted from the digits in a message. The papers then had to be disposed of. One option was to fold them tight (like an accordion) and place them on something metal to burn them; another was to soak the paper in water and then rub it with your fingers until it broke up and flush what was left down the toilet. Illegals would spend hours hunched over their notepad, carefully transposing letters and numbers. But all that work was for a reason. As long as only the sender and recipient have the same one-time pad and use it properly, then such a message is impossible to crack even by the most advanced supercomputer. And so, as the investigation began, the FBI’s frustration was that it lacked insight into what was being communicated. But eventually they would get their break, thanks to a discovery at the home of another family of illegals. And that would transform the investigation.

8

Breaking and Entering

IT WAS THE middle of the night and the apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, was dark. Derek Pieper was waiting nervously outside. His job was to be the lookout. The family who lived there in 2005 was on vacation but he had to make sure no nosy neighbors turned up unexpectedly while his colleagues turned over the place. Inside, Maria Ricci and her small team, dressed in black, were hard at work. The team was small because the two-bedroom apartment was. They did not want to literally fall over each other and knock something over. The atmosphere was tense, as it always was. They had to work fast but carefully. Everything would have to be put back exactly where it was. An FBI covert search looks an awful lot like a high-end burglary. But, apart from being legally authorized, the difference was that the aim was not to take anything away that might be missed. The team inside worked their way through the apartment methodically—the couple’s clothing, the toys that belonged to the two girls who shared a room. Then they made their way to the TV in the family room. It sat on a large cabinet. In the cabinet were lots of shoe boxes. Inside one were pictures of family trips. The father of the family liked to take photos and there were plenty more like that. Another box had the school report cards for the two girls who lived in the apartment. The reports were glowing. But one box was different. Inside was a phone, notebooks, and floppy disks. It looked interesting but at the time no one on the team could have known that the contents of that box would transform the investigation into the illegals.

The apartment belonged to the Murphy family. Richard Murphy was supposedly born in Philadelphia. His wife, Cynthia Hopkins, known as Cindy, was from New York. Richard had a round face and was slightly pudgy. He could get grumpy. Cindy was thinner, stylish, with short dark hair. She could appear dour but could turn on a smile when she needed to. They were another pair of illegals, but with different cover than Heathfield and Foley. They arrived in the second half of the 1990s posing as citizens born in America. Doing this had required using fake birth certificates to back up their story. The quality of these certificates, the FBI would later note half-admiringly, was high-class. “They were incredible,” says one agent. Using a fake certificate in America relied on the fact that birth certificates were different in each state and varied from year to year, so an official would almost never spot anything amiss unless they were already suspicious. Additionally, there was no central database to check. But even if they were brilliant fakes, they were still fakes, which meant this couple’s backstory was weaker than Heathfield and Foley’s. When the FBI searched a Manhattan safety deposit box belonging to Richard Murphy, they photographed his birth certificate. They contacted the Philadelphia Bureau of Vital Statistics, who said no record could be found for either Murphy or his supposed father.

Richard Murphy studied international affairs part-time at the New School in New York from 2002 to 2005, a chance to build cover and contacts. In a strange coincidence, his adviser on the faculty was the great-granddaughter of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev. She was puzzled by the young man with an Irish name but a Russian accent. “You know when you meet your countryman even if this countryman speaks a different language and pretends not to be your countryman,” she later said. She found it odd that he never tried to speak Russian to her or ask about her family. As a result, she decided she would not ask about his. Perhaps he was someone who wanted to put his Russian past behind him, she thought. “He was a little dour I must say. He was not always happy, which is a bit Russian because, you know, misery is what we do best.”

The couple moved into the small Hoboken apartment in 2003 with their two daughters, Katie and Lisa. Neighbors suspected nothing. One family, who also had two young kids, got to know them well. Cindy would cook up a lasagna and cakes—once making cookies shaped like the Statue of Liberty. The two families would barbecue together out on the back patio and go ice-skating and hiking together. Richard and Cindy seemed to enjoy each other’s company but were not very “touch-feely,” the other couple thought. An FBI team watching their every move would get to know the couple and the state of their marriage much better than the neighbors, though.

The illegals investigation was tightly held within the FBI. It began with the New York field office because that was where Poteyev had been recruited. But once it became clear it was going to offer insights into illegals operating across the country, headquarters in Washington, DC, took on a coordinating function. Initially it was known as “the backroom cases” to the small group read into the investigation in headquarters. It sat with the FBI’s SVR unit, whose job was to track SVR activities in the United States. Their main office normally had around six to eight people working together. But there was a small back room that had four more pods that people could work out of. This “back room” was where the illegals cases were coordinated from and where all the highly classified materials were kept. This was a counterintelligence case rather than a counterespionage case. The latter were focused on arresting those, normally Americans, who were passing on secrets to foreign powers; the former were more about understanding the activities of a foreign intelligence service operating inside the United States and more rarely led to arrests.

Alan Kohler, a New Jersey native, joined the SVR unit in 2003, having previously served as a spy-catcher in the Washington field office. A year and a half later he was promoted to chief of the SVR unit and decided it was time to give the whole investigation a formal code name (there were separate code names within each field office and for each target). A computer spits out a list of five options a day for the bureau. If you do not like any, then you can log in the next day and get another five and keep waiting it out until you get one you like. Or you can come up with your own and take it to the team for them to approve. An analyst in the SVR unit came up with a list of names and brought it to Kohler. The others are lost to history, but one stood out as her favorite—Ghost Stories. The FBI tries to shy away from a code name that tells you too much about the case it refers to—after all, the whole point of a code name is that it hides the truth. But agents do sometimes like to come up with something a bit clever or that has an inside joke or reference. In this case everyone agreed that Ghost Stories fit perfectly with the world of dead doubles. And so it was settled.

Ghost Stories would be at once one of the largest but also one of the most sensitive counterintelligence investigations in the bureau’s history, revealed in detail here for the first time. The investigation would eventually sprawl across the country, with field offices in Washington, Chicago, Seattle, Boston, as well as New York involved, each passing on news of significant developments through headquarters. The New York field office was the hub for much of the investigative work over the decade. It was where the case had started and many of the illegals would live around the New York region. In 2006, Kohler was promoted to the New York field office to supervise the counterespionage team and became the supervising agent for the illegals cases there, through to the end.

In New York, he would work with two younger officers who would play a key role in the investigation into the Murphys and the wider illegals. Maria Ricci, an Italian-American with an infectious laugh, had grown up in New Jersey. She was not one of those people who had dreamed of being an FBI agent as a child. “If someone said you were going to be an FBI agent, I would have thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard in my life,” she says. She had been an English major and then trained as a lawyer, but after five years practicing decided she wanted to work in public service. She applied to join the FBI as a lawyer. She was told there were no openings for lawyers but was asked if she would be interested in being an FBI agent. In 2002, to her surprise, she found herself as an agent with her first case, investigating Russian illegals. She would see it through to the end and spend more time on it than any other agent in New York. As a result, colleagues like to joke she was the OG—the “original gangster”—of the team.

Derek Pieper, originally from Boston, was another long-standing member of the team. Quieter, with a dry sense of humor, he had also been to law school after Harvard but decided he did not want to be a lawyer. He had worked as an investigator on public corruption in New York and then joined the bureau’s New York field office in 2004. Investigating organized crime seemed the most interesting possibility at the time but instead he found his first assignment was to the counterintelligence squad investigating illegals. He too would see the case through to the end. The squad had to keep things tight even from neighboring counterintelligence teams. “The next squad over had no idea what we were doing,” says Pieper. Because the team also hunted for treacherous Americans, it was sometimes assumed by colleagues that their secretiveness might be because they were investigating someone within the building. Working counterintelligence was not the way to make yourself popular.

The FBI agents found themselves plunged into a strange world. Ricci would talk to some of her Boston colleagues who were following Heathfield and Foley about what it took to be an illegal. “This is crazy. I can’t imagine going to Quantico and being told: you know what, Maria, you’re really good at languages, we think you have an ability to be an illegal—I want you to give up your life, your family, your friends, everything, go to Moscow, live a completely different life. You can’t call home anymore. You can’t say ‘Happy birthday, Mom.’ By the way, here’s your new husband.” They had a front-row seat into the SVR’s most secret program and yet the reality was they were watching a family like the Murphys in suburbia. “When you think of a Russian spy you are thinking of someone rappelling off a rooftop or jumping out of a plane,” Maria Ricci said years later. “What I think of is these two eating a hamburger at the family picnic and drinking really bad beer.”

The FBI’s armory of techniques includes monitoring and recording phone calls and emails, searching bank records, placing covert video cameras in public places and hotel rooms, and physical surveillance of suspects. But one of the most important would be the covert searches of their homes. The FBI’s job may include combating crime, but one of its core investigative techniques is to do something that, if a passerby happened to spot it, would look a lot like breaking and entering. A covert search is legally authorized to support the FBI’s mission. But it still involves people in the middle of the night getting into someone else’s property and having a root around. In the case of the illegals this would have seemed even stranger to a passerby. It was not as if these were offices belonging to a company or someone thought to have mob links. These were ordinary suburban houses and apartments belonging to people with families.

Covert searches are risky. If one of the illegals realizes there has been a break-in, either because they notice something in the wrong place or a neighbor tells them there were some strange goings-on when they were out, then they might well suspect the FBI was on to them. In that case, the whole investigation could be over. This meant the searches were carried out only rarely. Typically, they would be done when you knew for sure the inhabitants of a property were out and there was no chance of them coming back. Out for dinner was not good enough—an argument or a bad meal and they could be back early. Out of town for a vacation when you knew the day of their return was better. But even then you still had to worry about neighbors. You do not want them seeing something strange and telling the owners or a police car waking the street with sirens. A property like that of the Murphys would maybe be searched twice a year. No more. “We didn’t go in just to have a look around,” explains Kohler.

An FBI team wants to know as much as possible about the lifestyle and the property before they go in. The FBI used experts who are “pattern of life analysts,” whose job is to learn every detail of people’s lives—when do they normally go to sleep and get up? Do they wake in the middle of the night much? When are the neighbors awake? Are there any dogs? What time does the garbage truck come? The last question is important because the FBI carried out what is called “Trash Cover,” which means switching trash cans before they are picked up. One source says that for a full decade, the FBI collected all the trash from the illegals’ houses to search it for any possible clues. “We owned almost every facet of their life. We knew what they were doing on a daily basis. When they came. When they went,” one FBI agent would later say.

A covert entry like that in Hoboken in 2005, which led to the key breakthrough, would usually take place in the middle of the night. A skeleton key or lock pick got you in. Then windows are carefully blocked out so that the team can use their own light inside without anyone outside becoming suspicious. It would include one or two case officers working directly on the investigation—like Maria Ricci or Derek Pieper—who might be able to spot the significant items. Others would be technical specialists. “You are literally sneaking around somebody’s house … there’s always pressure,” says Ricci; “they lived in an apartment building, so walls are thin. So you would hear the guy next door cough and you realize you really needed to be quiet … We went in when we had a reason to go in.” Every time you went in, you rolled the dice. Too many times and chances are you would eventually make a mistake. The team searching in Hoboken realized that their targets were using small tricks to detect whether anyone had been inside their apartment while they were away. When the Murphys’ closets were opened, they were packed with items. In some cases, strings were weaved around things in a particular pattern. In another there were coins in pockets of certain clothes. Disturbing the string or coins would make it hard to put them back in exactly the same way. They were simple but effective tricks using everyday items. It meant the FBI team decided not to touch certain things, as they could not take the risk.

One role for covert entry teams was the placement of tiny listening devices—microphones or bugs that were able to pick up conversations in the room. This is something the FBI has long experience in developing, so they can be hidden in everyday items. The bureau will not comment on what these might be, where they can be placed, or how they work, for fear of tipping off subjects of investigation. But they gave a deep insight into what targets talked about and how they lived their lives—right down to how they talk to their children and to each other. “I practically lived with the Murphys for so long,” says Ricci. “I feel I know Richard Murphy better than some of my relatives, which may say something quite bad about me.”

The hours were long for the FBI team, just as they were for the illegals. The amount of material produced by the bugs was enormous. Every time a floorboard squeaked, the recording device would be tripped and the recording would need to be reviewed. The squad of agents had to sit listening to the endless chatter of daily life, hoping somewhere in there was a nugget that might be a clue to some spy activity. The FBI team never heard the Murphys talk to each other about the challenges of living as an illegal. Even when they were alone in the house together, they never broke cover and talked to each other either in Russian or in English about their real work. They certainly seemed aware of the possibility of some kind of surveillance. Occasionally there might be a hushed conversation somewhere in the house that was hard to pick up on the listening devices but seemed to correlate with when there was an operational meeting coming up, but it was hard to be sure.

One of the curious, almost uncomfortable, aspects of the FBI’s work was the voyeuristic insight it gave into a couple’s marriage and their family life. Living such a strange double life could strengthen the bonds of marriage—providing the sense of a shared mission and the chance to support each other. But it could also introduce strains. The fact the Murphys did not turn to each other to share the burden—even in pillow talk—surprised the FBI team. “It’s a little strange that Richard would never turn to Cynthia, but I think there was a competition between them,” explains Pieper. The FBI team came to believe that Cynthia felt her husband was not performing as well as he should as a spy and there was tension in the household. Recordings would even have captured the couple’s most intimate moments. How do agents deal with that? “Throughout all monitoring, the FBI is diligent in managing what is not relevant,” one agent involved in the case explains. “So with regards to intimate moments, professionally you skip ahead.”

An important goal in covert searches was to find any evidence of “tradecraft”—the kind of gadgets or paraphernalia that are used by spies and which would provide hard evidence to prove these individuals were Russians. The team would photograph anything that looked even the slightest bit interesting while tech experts would copy any electronic media like CDs or memory sticks and leave them in place. A key question was how the group was communicating back to Moscow Center.

IT WAS DURING the 2005 Hoboken search that the FBI team hit pay dirt thanks to the boxes of photos in the TV cabinet. When the FBI first got onto the trail of the illegals, they could not see inside their covert communications. All they could see was that they were using code pads and encryption techniques that made messages unbreakable. Unlike Lazaro, the Murphys had been in the United States since the 1990s and so were able to update their covert communications to take into account new technology and particularly the emergence of the World Wide Web. From 2000, they started using a new technique, one that it would take the FBI five years to understand. When they did, it would prove to be one of the great breakthroughs in the entire case.

Inside the shoe box were floppy disks and notebooks. This looked interesting, but when you were searching a suspected spy’s house, everything looked potentially interesting and you never knew what would turn out to be some kind of hidden piece of spy equipment. But the instincts in this case were right. The box would be pivotal to the investigation. But it would not yield its secrets easily or quickly.

The contents of the box were taken away to be analyzed. An initial forensic computer analysis of the floppy disks found them to be blank. But that did not seem right. So they carried out another check. Again they came up blank. Next the team asked the FBI’s computer experts to copy the disks onto other disks—to re-create them so they could play around with them a bit more. Among the papers in the shoe box was one page that had “alt-control-e” written on it along with twenty-seven seemingly random characters. Was it a password? It was time to experiment a little. They put in one of the floppy disks and pressed alt-control-e. Nothing. They tried a different disk. Same process. Nothing. But just when it looked like a dead end, they tried another disk. This time the seemingly empty disk sprang to life. There was a prompt for a password. There was elation for the team. But it was short-lived. They put in the twenty-seven characters from the piece of paper. Nothing. They tried again. Same response. Maybe it had been written down backward? They tried the combination every which way. Nothing. But then another member of the team walked by the agents sitting huddled over the computer. He looked over their shoulder at what they were doing and then at a digit on the piece of paper and said, “You know that’s a one, right?” It had looked like a seven because of the way the Murphys had written it, but in Russian it was the way they wrote the number one. “No—we did not know that was a one,” they replied sheepishly and quickly went back to the screen. This time as the last character went in, the screen suddenly changed. A prompt appeared. “Please insert picture disc.” They were inside the illegals’ covert communications system.

Imagine a picture on any normal website. It is made up of data—ones and zeroes—that when downloaded tell a computer how to reconstitute the image on-screen. What if hidden among that data are ones and zeroes that have nothing to do with the image but actually make up a secret message? Thousands of people could visit that website. But only if they had the right software would the message be downloaded. And even if it were spotted by an unintended recipient, it is encrypted, so it cannot be read. This is steganography—the trick of hiding a message inside an image.

Hiding messages has been around for some time. One story from a couple of thousand years ago involves a courier’s head being shaved and a message being tattooed on his scalp. The hair is allowed to grow back and anyone intercepting the courier on route will not see anything. But the person whom the courier arrives to see knows that all they have to do is shave his head again to reveal the message. Another example from the twentieth century was the microdot. This was so small as to be invisible and could be put on a stamp or postcard but contained a message that could be read if you knew it was there. By the twenty-first century and the illegals, a new world of digital steganography had arrived.

The FBI team realized you had to insert a disk that had six pictures on it and then another disk with the message you wanted to send. The computer would analyze the pictures to work out which picture was best suited to hiding the message. Once it had done so, it would say something like “number six” to indicate the best one and then encrypt—or scramble—the message. Each time it would be encrypted differently, so you needed a program to be able to decrypt it each time. Moscow Center had created its own bespoke software. In order to extract and then decrypt and read the data, you needed the same SVR-supplied software. Without it the message was unbreakable.

There was also a list of public blog sites on the Web where people could upload their pictures. Richard Murphy loved taking pictures of flowers, and often these pictures would have the message hidden inside them. They would be uploaded to the Web and then at the other end Moscow Center could download and decrypt them. The FBI also copied the hard drive of a computer. On it they found an electronic address book with links to website addresses along with a history of which sites the computer had accessed. They downloaded images from the site that looked entirely innocent—including some of colorful flowers. But when the steganography program was applied, readable text files magically appeared. The FBI team asked their tech expert to create their own version of the encryption program that had every different encryption key on it. They were able to go back and decrypt some earlier messages, as well as new ones that arrived.

The shoe box had been the key to understanding the illegals’ communications and would transform the investigation. This item would become known to grateful FBI officers as the “tradecraft box.” There was one moment, though, when they feared they might lose their access. One winter Maria Ricci was going back into the Murphys’ house just before New Year’s Eve. You always did a search for a reason and this time it was because there were indications that there was a change in the communications system—most likely new disks. This was a night search. These are more stressful. Neighbors are likely to be sleeping but if you are discovered there are fewer ways to explain why you are in someone else’s house. Ricci was being as quiet as she could with her small team as they hunted for new disks. They found them quickly. But what about the new password to go with them? They were not in the shoe box. Nor any other obvious place. So they started looking anywhere and everywhere else. Still nothing. Minutes turned into hours and the tension was rising. In the end they had to give up. The team made their way back deeply discouraged, assuming they had blown it—without the password they could no longer be able to read the messages. After all that worry when they returned to base and inserted the new disks, it turned out the password had not been changed.

Because of his computer skills, Murphy would later lecture Moscow Center on the technical limitations of the communication system and how hard it was to encode a message. This was gold dust for the FBI, since it helped them further understand the workings of the SVR’s top secret system. At one point he explained to Moscow that if the FBI were ever to get hold of the material the illegals had been given, they would have both the instructions and the passwords in one fell swoop. Which of course they had already done. His complaint was absolutely correct, and it was fortunate for the FBI that the SVR did not listen.

When the FBI’s Boston team went into the Heathfield and Foley house in 2006, they now knew what to look for. One of the computer disks looked similar to the New Jersey find and it too required a twenty-seven-character password. Traces of deleted electronic messages were found that FBI technicians were able to recover. These were drafts of messages sent to Moscow using steganography. Other illegals would also use the technique. The break into the communications was critical for the case. “For us, that was a gamechanger,” Tony Rogers of the Boston FBI field office later said.

The FBI could not only read the messages going back and forth between the illegals and Moscow Center but—thanks to the bugs in the house—they could even hear the illegals sometimes discussing what they thought of what Moscow Center was telling them to do and how it made them feel. That was something even their SVR controllers would not know. “That’s everything,” says Alan Kohler. “There’s nothing going on with this cell that we don’t know about.”

This allowed the FBI to stay one step ahead of the illegals. If they were planning a covert meeting, then there was no need to follow the spies to find out where it was and risk being spotted. Since you knew exactly where and when the meeting would take place, you could simply stake out the location ready for them to arrive. But even more important, it provided an insight into what orders they were being sent from Moscow and what intelligence they were sending back. Their overall mission was set out in a message sent to the Murphys: “The only goal and task of our Service and of us is security of our country. All our activities are subjected to this goal. Only for reaching this goal you were dispatched to US, settled down there, gained legal status and were expected to start striking up usefull [sic] acquaintances, broadening circle of your well placed connections, gaining information and eventually recruiting sources.”

This was the mission of the illegals. To pose as Americans, bury themselves deep, and then identify people who could help Russia. And in Moscow, there was a new master for Russia’s spies. He was one of their own and a man for whom the importance of spying—and catching your enemy’s spies—was utmost in his mind.

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