The complaints published by the American authorities are also interesting for what they do not say. They do not give any detailed account of the illegals’ tasking: what were they really trying to do, and how? The overall instruction is to create convincing cover stories: but for what purpose? Heathfield is said to have tried to find out about America’s bunker-busting bombs. The complaint alludes indirectly to his attempts to befriend Leon Fuerth, a former senior administration official, and to contacts between ‘Cynthia Murphy’ and a Democratic Party bigwig (which I cover in more detail in the next chapter). The reader learns a lot – perhaps a surprising amount for those unused to the spy world – about the mechanics of spying: the cover stories, the foreign travel, the code words and the use of laptops. He learns very little about the substance.
The official explanation is that the Russian illegals indeed failed to make any real headway in America. They consumed much of Moscow’s money and time, but succeeded only in infiltrating suburbia. A neat twist in this portrayal is that even this bit of the Russians’ mission looks unsuccessful. They may have deceived their neighbours, but from the very beginning they were under the eagle-eyed scrutiny of the FBI. Nobody in America needs to feel embarrassed, because no secrets were stolen. That is comforting but not wholly plausible. For a start, the idea that the FBI and its overseas partner agencies would manage (or want) to keep ten people, some of them seasoned intelligence officers, under constant surveillance in multiple countries for a period of many years is fanciful. Even for a well-funded US government agency, the cost in time and money would be colossal. More to the point, it would be risky: a small slip-up would set alarm bells ringing in Moscow and quite possibly lead to the quarry vanishing. It is more likely that only some were under long-term surveillance and that even this was not constant. It is probable that all ten came under complete observation only at the end.
Establishing assets able to move easily in a hostile environment is in itself a major achievement for an intelligence service. Whether they were spotting potential recruitment targets, collecting information, or servicing other agents, the illegals’ activities cannot be regarded as harmless or benign. As I show later, even the junior Ms Chapman had previously helped out with a questionable money-transfer operation, involving apparent identity theft and other shenanigans. It is hard to believe that all her counterparts in America were less active. She and Mikhail Semenko were regularly conducting secret communications with Russian intelligence officers. It is unlikely that they were merely exchanging test transmissions or remarks about the weather.
Another factor that may have sanitised the FBI’s account of the illegals’ activities is the political climate. Anybody who had fallen seriously into the clutches of one of these illegals would be unhappy to have the fact broadcast. Humiliating influential people by highlighting their cooperation with Russian espionage would be a mistake on almost any count. It would make unnecessary enemies – something that an agency with acute political antennae knows to avoid. It would raise the question of whether these individuals should be prosecuted, with all the embarrassment and unwelcome publicity involved. Nor would the FBI see any great need to make an example, assuming such people are dupes, not traitors. The Bureau could just identify the people acting as sources for the illegals and deliver a quiet but sorrowful warning, explaining that they were on a slippery slope that could have all too easily ended up in disgrace or jail. Such a conversation would almost certainly end with an admonition to discuss its content with nobody – a course of action strongly in the interests of both sides. In short: absence of evidence that the illegals were effective is not the same as evidence that they were not.
A second political dimension is US–Russian relations. As noted earlier, for all its shortcomings, the ‘reset’ is one of the few bits of Mr Obama’s foreign policy to have shown any sign of success. Although the White House could not ignore the FBI’s evidence of extensive and potentially damaging Russian espionage, it would be quite natural for the country’s political leaders to try to limit the wider diplomatic fallout by presenting the illegals as more comic than sinister. Were the public to believe that the spies had done serious harm to the nation’s interests, it would be a lot harder to explain why senior figures in the administration saw fit to hobnob so cordially with their Russian counterparts.
For all these reasons, the illegals’ arrest was presented to avoid any great sense of alarm or urgency. The message from background briefings was of patronising sorrow rather than anger: it was a pity that Russia still felt the need to play these strange old-fashioned games, both because of what it said about the thinking in Moscow and also because these fossilised spies – sad relics of the old days of superpower rivalry – had achieved so little. Yet as I show in the next chapter, the illegals’ activity in America and elsewhere gives no grounds for such complacency.
6
Spies Like Us
Gathered in the same room, Richard and Cynthia Murphy, Donald Heathfield and Anne Foley, Juan Lazaro, Vicky Peláez, Michael Zottoli and Patricia Mills, Mikhail Semenko and Anna Chapman would have seemed like a bunch of unremarkable Americans. They spoke English fluently, with varying accents; they had jobs ranging from the humdrum to the glamorous. Their neighbours and work colleagues noticed nothing extraordinary about them. But when they did meet for the first time, it was in a courtroom, shortly before their deportation to Russia. The ten were at the centre of the FBI’s most spectacular and successful counter-intelligence operation for decades: Operation Ghost Stories. According to the American authorities’ criminal complaints, they and persons unknown
unlawfully, wilfully and knowingly, did combine, conspire, confederate, and agree together and with each other to commit an offense against the United States.
It stated that the FBI’s investigation has revealed that
a network of illegals is now living and operating in the United States in the service of one primary, long-term goaclass="underline" to become sufficiently Americanized, such that they can gather information about the United States for Russia, and can successfully recruit sources who are in, or are able to infiltrate, United States policy-making circles.1
Richard and Cynthia Murphy lived in the New York suburb of Montclair.2 She had two undergraduate degrees from New York University and an MBA from Columbia Business School, and she worked in a financial services firm in New York. Her stocky, bearded husband had studied economics at the New School in New York, where his heavy accent and gloomy manner aroused only mild curiosity. Nina Khrushcheva, his Soviet-born supervisor, was puzzled by his claim to be of Irish extraction; to her well-tuned ear he sounded ‘instantly Russian’.3 But America is built on the idea that people can reinvent themselves, shedding identities from the old world and adopting new ones. Murphy was no different. Nothing else he did seemed to arouse any interest at all. As far as any outsider could see his main job was caring for the couple’s young daughters Katie and Lisa, aged eleven and seven in June 2010. That was when their parents – real names Vladimir and Lidiya Guryev – were arrested.