The ‘illegal’ agents were spies operating in a Western country, with a false life or ‘legend’, pretending in this case to be regular suburban Americans. Naturally for each SVR officer engaged in this deep-cover work there were several others needed to support them. This might involve delivering money or communications kit to dead drops or preparing the false identities that illegals used. In addition to their working legend, each of these prized operatives could return to Russia (usually every three years), for a few weeks’ leave and to see their families. These journeys usually involved going via two or three other places, changing identity on each leg of the journey, another administrative headache for the officers assisting them. These ‘enablers’ were usually posted under diplomatic cover, serving Line S sections within a rezidentura. Other officers in the station collected political or technical intelligence, each operating in their own silo, knowing nothing about the illegals.
Poteyev was working under cover at the Russian mission in New York when he offered his services as a walk-in to the FBI. At the time, he had been tasked to support some illegals in South and Central America, but returning to the US on a subsequent tour, in a more senior post, he had oversight of Department S operations in the Americas as a whole.
When he went back to Moscow, Poteyev was promoted to Deputy Head of Department S, giving him detailed knowledge of SVR illegal operations globally. From the FBI and CIA’s point of view, he proved to be a quite astounding long-term asset.
The network revealed, bit by bit, to the Americans consisted of four couples. By June 2010 they were located in New York, Boston, and Washington DC.
The oldest of the illegals, *Juan Lazaro, had begun his work overseas thirty-four years earlier in Peru. He relocated with his Peruvian wife to New York in 1984. By the time arrests were drawing close, Lazaro had been living a double life for so long that, Western intelligence officers told me, he had actually succeeded in retiring from the SVR, who were content for him to stay put in the US. Many in Department S, indeed, regarded this as a perfect career for an illegal; to blend in so completely that you never left, so neighbours or colleagues never asked awkward questions.
Another of the couples watched by the FBI for at least six years prior to their arrest had arrived in the US after ten years of building up their legend, living in Canada and France.
These agents were the product of a remarkable investment by the KGB then SVR. Their training in Russia – both spycraft and attempts to perfect a foreign language to near-native proficiency – could take five to ten years. Add to that periods spent in third countries building up their false identities and you could have someone who had devoted fifteen to twenty years to becoming an operational illegal. Naturally, in this drawn-out process, there were quite a few failures or people who simply quit, adding further to the expense of the whole Department S operation.
Even in 2010, though, this type of spying still held a special place in Russian intelligence history and culture. Some of the greatest heroes of the KGB and GRU, like those who’d gained the secrets of the atom bomb or warned of Hitler’s plan to invade Russia, were illegals. During the Cold War such agents were regarded within the KGB as the most ideologically sound, since they were living lives of plenty in the West, something that many Soviet citizens might have dreamed of, but never forgot their true loyalty.
Many years after he became leader, it emerged that Vladimir Putin’s 1980s KGB work in East Germany had been as a Department S officer, supporting illegals.
‘I know what kind of people these are,’ recalled Putin, ‘these are special people, people of special qualities, of special conviction, with a special character. To give up their life, their nearest and dearest and leave the country for many years, and to dedicate one’s life to the Fatherland, not everyone is capable of doing that.’
After the Cold War, it amazed many Western intelligence people that Russia still bothered with such deep-cover operations. After all, increasing amounts of information were obtainable over the internet, an invention which also made it far harder to invent a past life for your operatives. And while 1930s Russia had access to revolutionaries from all over the place, people who actually were native speakers of other languages, the characters sent to the US in the 1990s and 2000s were Russians who, in a few cases, never quite lost their accents.
The illegal network, like the GRU’s caches of weapons for saboteurs, was evidence of the unreformed nature of Russia’s agencies. These were after all preparations for war, one part of Department S’s role being to provide an alternative presence to the officers in embassies if these were forced to leave in time of conflict.
Instructions to this spy ring intercepted by the Americans indicated its main mission, deriving from the Centre’s preoccupation with infiltrating what they termed the country’s ‘ruling circles’, the concept itself being a Marxist holdover. They thus gravitated towards academia, think tanks, or the financial world. In this way, it was hoped, they would be able to mix with State Department, CIA people, or bankers, even if their own false identities were never well enough established to join the Federal government themselves.
What did they achieve? The Russian press would later claim exotic recruitments on their behalf, but the Americans suggest that whenever the undercover Russians got close to anyone in possession of real secrets, they acted to disrupt any actual recruitment. FBI agents would have a discreet word, and the American would quietly break contact. All of this was possible, of course, because Poteyev’s intelligence had allowed them to stay one step ahead of the undercover SVR officers, keeping them under surveillance for years.
Many times during this long investigation the officers in the CD1 section at the FBI, the agents masterminding it, had to ask whether the time had come to reel in the Russians. They had to consider not just the diplomatic ramifications but also, steeped in the Bureau’s law-enforcement traditions as they were, what kind of case they might actually bring to court. A senior FBI agent told me:
They’re hard cases to make. Just because you’re able to charge someone doesn’t make it a winnable case. With the Russians we were trying to improve the relationship and you know there’ll be consequences. Thinking beyond a conviction was really tough on that case.
Add to this the fact that their disruption of the Russians’ activities had prevented any actual disclosure of secrets (or so the FBI always insisted) and the problem of building something that would stand up in court became harder still. With matters moving to a head in 2010, they added Chapman and Semenko to the file. These two, who had not been long in the US, were not actually illegals at all but ‘Nocs’, the term American intelligence types use for those under Non-Official Cover. While they had been successfully entrapped on 26 June, the same was not true of the illegals, where the FBI cases depended more on their use of fake documents, money-laundering statutes, other bureaucratic violations, and a US law against being an ‘unregistered agent’ of a foreign country.
There was another factor also underlying the timing of any arrest, which was that it could not happen while Poteyev was still in Russia. During the years of Ghost Stories surveillance, his safety was an absolute priority. As for what brought matters to a head, early in June 2010, it is not completely clear. It may be that Poteyev felt he was under suspicion and triggered his own extraction or that for reasons we do not yet know the CIA advised him to leave. However, if officials are to be believed, it was a simple professional judgement within CD1 that might finally have tipped the balance of the decision. The operation had gone on for over a decade and consumed considerable resources, after all. It was known that both Chapman and one of the illegals were planning imminent trips back to Russia and the FBI didn’t want to lose them. Furthermore, intelligence had reached the CIA that *Christopher Metsos, a Department S officer who had run missions into the US a few years before to support illegals, happened to be in Cyprus. If they could get him too, then the evidence linking the others arrested to the SVR would be stronger as surveillance had shown Metsos delivering money to them in America during 2001 and 2002.