Having taken the decision to proceed much more aggressively, the FBI moved against Chapman and Semenko, in a bid to entrap them, so matters moved to their crisis. Sensing something wrong, Chapman had rung her father, a former KGB general, who advised her to go to the New York police and hand in the fake passport given to her by Roman. It could be an American ‘provocation’ designed to compromise her, so best play a double bluff. The next day she turned up at the NYPD’s 1st Precinct to do just that. By then the word had been given by Bureau headquarters to arrest the whole network.
On the afternoon of 27 June, *Donald Heathfield and his wife *Tracey Foley were relaxing at their home in Cambridge just outside Boston. It was a Sunday and they’d been out for lunch at an Indian restaurant to celebrate their son Tim’s twentieth birthday. He and his brother were upstairs when there was a knock on the front door.
Moments later teams of FBI agents poured into the house. Hearing the commotion Tim stepped onto the landing to see his parents being cuffed and walked out to waiting cars. An agent told him they had been arrested for being ‘unlawful agents of a foreign government’.
The events in Boston were just one part of a coordinated global operation. In New York and Washington DC the other arrests were going down. Metsos was picked up in Cyprus also.
The following day, 28 June, an MI6 officer confronted a man on a street in Madrid. He had been living in Spain for the best part of twenty years under the legend of *Harry Frith. The Spanish government, it seems, did not want to arrest and try Frith, but they were willing to allow an attempted pitch by the British. A transcript of the MI6 man’s offer was subsequently passed to a journalist.
‘If we do not talk now then I’m afraid there’s going to be a big problem for you here in Spain,’ the SIS officer explained, ‘I work for a Western special service and you work for Russian special services. I know this is a shock and I’m sorry that I have to do this on the street but it was the only way I could get to talk to you securely.’
Frith denied everything, telling the Briton that he was mistaken. But the next morning he fled Spain, never to return. Perhaps, once he was over the initial fright of the encounter on the street, he had rationalized that if the Spanish were willing to arrest him that’s what would have happened already. Metsos too managed to slip the net, disappearing after a bail hearing in Cyprus.
But in the United States, the FBI had ten people in custody: seven deep-cover Russian agents, Lazaro’s Peruvian wife, and the two Nocs, Chapman and Semenko. The interrogations began. Derek Pieper, an FBI man who’d spent years watching the *Murphys, a couple based in New Jersey, attempted to make headway with the wife, *Cynthia:
I tried to talk to her about the kids, make sure she knew that we were taking care of the kids, that we were setting them up with friends. She wouldn’t budge, she was cold, she gave me the ‘I understand what you’re doing, I understand your job, but I think I’m going to talk to an attorney’. Cold. That was it.
At Yasenovo, the SVR headquarters outside Moscow, these dread bits of news came in one after another during the final days of June and first ones of July: Colonel Poteyev of Department S had disappeared, presumed defected; their American spy ring was in the bag, complete; Metsos had just got away in Cyprus, Frith had managed to flee Spain. A few other illegals remained in place (in Germany and Canada for example) but they had to assume that the entire network had been compromised. It was about as big a disaster as any of them could imagine.
Then, on 4 July, the director of the SVR got a call. It was Leon Panetta, Director of the CIA.
‘I got on the phone with my Russian counterpart, Mikhail Fradkov, who was right out of central casting for a Russian spy,’ Panetta explained in a later CNN interview, ‘and I put him on speakerphone and I said, “Mikhail, I want you to know that we’re aware that they’re your people.” I looked around the room and you know, our people were waiting for what Fradkov would say because there was this silence. And then Fradkov said, “Yes they are our people.” And you could see all these jaws drop in the room at the fact that he was acknowledging that they were Russian spies. I said, “Look, we would like to work out an exchange,” and he agreed to those next steps.’
It was game on. The question for the CIA was: if there was going to be a swap, who did they want in return? The aftershocks of this sudden reversal for Russian intelligence were felt in many places. They even reached IK 5, that labour camp in Mordovia, where a GRU colonel was barely halfway through his sentence.
15
DELIVERANCE
Two days after Panetta’s call with Fradkov, one of the guards went into Skripal’s dorm in camp IK 5. It was not long after lunch, and the prisoner was resting on his bed. The summer is brief but intense in Mordovia. Its afternoon torpor had made Skripal a little sleepy.
‘Please get all your stuff ready and be at the HQ block in ten minutes,’ came the order.
‘What’s happening?’ Skripal replied, raising himself on the bed.
‘Maybe you’re going to another camp.’
He started to move quickly, packing things away and summoning his mates. If he was really being transferred there was precious little he could take with him. He wanted his paratrooper friends to have all the stuff he wouldn’t be allowed – food and other goodies, his clothes. He called them his prison ‘family’. That’s what you did for family. So after packing a small bag and bidding them farewell, he made his way over to the HQ block where he stood around outside the camp offices. Nothing happened.
After an hour, a warrant officer appeared. He told Skripal he was being taken to Moscow. More time passed and two black FSB cars arrived. Well, this is professional, he thought, having a back-up vehicle in case one breaks down. He was directed into one of the vehicles and their journey began.
Skripal peered out of the window, watching the Mordovian forest flickering by. They drove for more than six hours without anyone saying a word to him. But of course as they got nearer to Moscow, he could read the road signs and his spirits climbed. The cars, the roadside clutter, the babushkas idling as they sped past, everything grew more dense as he escaped the endless forest, and neared Russia’s capital. Definitely not another camp.
A little later they got to Lefortovo prison. It was nearly four years since he’d left it, following his conviction. He settled down for ‘a nice meal, and a sleep’.
While Skripal slumbered, officials in Washington worked away, putting the finishing touches to their deal. From their side there was a presumption that the Russians they had in custody would want to take their children with them. But some of them were not minors and would be able to make a free choice. Juan Lazaro’s son, for example, decided to stay in New York.
Ever since the Panetta–Fradkov phone conversation on 4 July, the question had been debated at Langley as to who they should ask for in return. They quickly agreed on Alexander Zaporozhsky – the high-value SVR asset who had been conned into coming home to Russia in 2001 and promptly jailed. Finding a second name wasn’t actually that easy. Despite the FSB’s claims to have jailed dozens of Russians spying for the West (Patrushev had given a figure of thirty-five caught between 2000 and 2004) there weren’t actually that many genuine US or indeed UK assets in Russian prisons.